It
by Rjalker
Summary: Funny thing about the morphing technology. It wasn't actually designed to be used by humans. So when Rachel develops an allergy to a crocodile, what should be an easy process becomes a shock that none of them saw coming. SEVERAL SCENES BEING REWRITTEN BECAUSE TOBIAS'S BOOKS ARE TERRIBLE LIARS.


One of the first memories I have is cold, and white.

Snow.

I remember the way it crunched under my shoes, the way the soft powder clung to my gloves.

The way Tinyel disappeared into it, turning into some _thing_ that was more mist than animal.

I remember the way my aunt finally came out to drag all of the kids back inside, and the way her snake daemon hid inside the hood of her coat for warmth.

I remember my mom helping me to pull my coat off because my hands were too cold to do much with the zipper, and her confusion when she didn't find Tinyel hiding inside it.

"Rachel," She asked me, "Where's Tinyel?"

I remember my next words very clearly, because they were the words that would set me apart from everyone for the rest of my life.

Up until that moment, I guess I'd never just said the words out loud. I was young, too young, I guess, to understand what it meant to everyone else.

 _Rachel_ , my mother asked me, _where is your daemon?_

And I answered, simply, "I left it outside to play in the snow."

I didn't think much of my words, didn't consider the effect they would have. Why should I have? It was something I'd known for as long as I had existed, for as long as I could remember.

I didn't understand why my mom's face went kind of weird when I answered, why her eyebrows lifted and her mouth twitched into a smile. Like I'd told a funny joke.

I realize now, she thought I was joking.

But I wasn't. Both in wording, and in truth.

My daemon was still outside, shifting through as many thoughts as crossed through its mind, diving and twirling through the snow we'd never seen before, that was so cold but so much fun to play in.

And yes, you read that right. Its mind. Not his, not hers.

I've gotten sick and tired of hiding it, of pretending that I'm normal. This war has changed me, and it has changed the way I think, changed the things I care about. And it's made me realize what's important, and what I really, truly care about.

My daemon is not a girl, and it is not a boy. It is simply...an it.

And I care about that. I care about that distinction, I care that everyone assumes that Tinyel is male, or when I deny that, that it is female. As though those are the only two choices, as though nothing else could possibly dare to exist.

I've pretended long enough, I've allowed people to assume, I've held my tongue when the urge to correct them has raised its head.

That first time I'd ever seen the snow was also the first time I realized 210 different from other people. When my mom realized that I wasn't joking, realized that my daemon really was still outside in the snow, she got afraid, and her daemon almost flew straight into the door in his hurry to get outside to look for mine. Whenever we go back to visit my grandparents, you can still see the deep gouges he carved into the door handle with his claws trying to get it open.

My mom picked me up and shouted something at my dad that I don't think he understood anymore than I did, and ran outside with me in her arms, her daemon, the large golden eagle that I had always thought was the most beautiful form in the world, shooting past us like a missile.

I remember the chilling wind whipping past my face as he flew, the edge of one wing just barely brushing my cheek, sending waves of worry and comfort spreading across my skin like warmth.

They didn't understand that I wasn't afraid, that I wasn't in pain. I guess they thought I was just in shock, or too confused to know what was going on.

I didn't realize at that point that it wasn't normal for your daemon to be able to travel more than a dozen feet away from you. I knew that people didn't like to let their daemons go too far, but I'd never really thought too much about it. I loved my daemon, and I wouldn't want it to be far away from me all the time, so it made sense that no one else would, either.

But that day, out in the snow, it just felt natural for Tinyel to stay outside when I had to go in to get warm, it made sense for it to have fun for the both of us, because it could become anything it wanted, could stay as warm as it liked, could become heat itself.

That was another thing I'd never realized, and wouldn't realize until later still. It's not normal for daemons to change into anything that's not an animal.

I knew that daemons could become imaginary things, like dragons or unicorns. It was a game we played at school all the time, to see who could make the scariest or cutest or weirdest creature.

And sometimes we played another game, where we all saw whose daemon could become the biggest, or the smallest.

Usually, the smallest the other kids could go was an insect, like a fly or an ant or sometimes even a maggot if they were particularly brave and wanted to gross everyone else out.

But Tinyel could always go smaller. What was an insect when compared to a grain of sand, or even the air itself? When your daemon could transform into a shadow as easily as it did a bird, there was no game we couldn't beat. Somehow, none of the other children thought too much of my daemon's ability, and they never mentioned it to any of the teachers, or their parents.

Everyone I went to kindergarten with knew that my daemon could do things theirs couldn't, but somehow, that information just never got passed along to any adults. I guess they just didn't think it was any big deal either. Maybe they just forgot, or, looking back, figured that they'd imagined the whole thing.

It took awhile, that day, for my mom and her daemon to calm down after we found Tinyel. I'd figured out that my mom was worried about it, and called it back to me through our bond. It came bounding out of the trees as a wolf with fur so white that the snow seemed gray in contrast, grinning widely as it trotted up to us, golden eyes blazing, panting with its tongue lolling out in its excitement.

It turned into a golden eagle to match my mom's daemon when it saw him, and came to land on my shoulder, shrinking down to the size of a sparrow right before it landed so that it didn't knock my mom over with its weight.

Mom started crying then, and she ran through the snow back to my grandparents' house, not even seeming to care how heavy I was, her daemon shooting up into the air high above us and keeping watch in every direction as though worried we would be followed.

When we finally got back to the house, all of the adults were worried and angry, and locked the door behind us.

Then the questions began, coming so fast that I didn't have a chance to understand any of them, before my grandmother finally demanded that everyone else be quiet. She told my dad and uncle to bring the rest of the kids to the den in the basement, to watch a movie.

That just left my mom, my aunt, and both of my grandparents in the room.

And then my grandmother turned to me, and her daemon, the grey plott hound whose eyes were pale and white with blindness, laid down and put his head on his paws, those blind eyes staring directly up at me.

And he asked me one question:

Did someone take Tinyel away from you?

And I answered, of course, with no.

And then more questions came, calmly and one at a time, until finally the adults were convinced that I was fine, Tinyel was fine, and no one had tried to kidnap us.

Which only raised more questions, but those ones weren't directed at me. It was rare, very rare, but not unheard of, for someone's daemon to be able to travel farther away from them than normal. I lost track of the following conversation between the adults, too preoccupied with petting Tinyel, who had taken on the form of a hedgehog whose spines were soft instead of pointy.

I've learned a lot since that day. I've learned to watch other people, to watch their daemons. In order to fit in, in order to seem normal, I'd have to learn from others exactly what normal was.

Before this whole thing started, before I watched Elfangor get eaten alive in front of my eyes, I was okay with pretending to be normal. I was okay with pretending that Tinyel could only travel a certain distance away from me, and I'd resigned myself to the fact that everyone would think it was male. It was something I'd gotten used to. Almost second nature.

But this war has changed me. I've done things I never would have thought possible, never would have ever wanted to do. I've killed more people than I can count, and my only consolation, the only thing I can tell myself to keep going is that they're already dead.

Isn't that what the heroes always tell themselves in the zombie movies? It's okay, what you're doing, because they aren't human anymore, not really. Their hearts don't beat, so they're dead. Their eyes are blank or crazed, and it's only some voodoo curse or virus that makes them animated, makes them move. There is no soul left in that body, nothing leaves it when its blood spills on the ground, the only thing you are doing is stopping the body, because the soul is already gone.

You aren't killing them, really, because they're already dead.

That's what I like to tell myself, afterwards. When the fear starts to set in, when I'm standing in the shower trying to get the blood out of my hair and from under my nails. I'm not really killing people, I like to whisper to myself, because they're already dead.

They are Controllers. But the word is misleading. It's a word chosen _by_ the Yeerks, _for_ the Yeerks.

They don't see the host, they see straight through the body and into the soul.

It's not a human being controlling its own movements, its own voice, its own life. It is the Yeerk inside the skull, wrapped around the brain, that decides everything. That Yeerk is the Controller, the human-Controller or Hork-Bajir-Controller, Taxxon-Controller, or even Andalite-Controller.

I'm not killing people, I tell myself, I am killing Controllers. Yeerks. The enemy. The slave keepers, the murderers. The voodoo curse that drives people mad. The virus that reanimates the dead. Those who would kill my sisters, murder my family, enslave everyone on the planet and drive millions of species to extinction.

Cassie told me that they see us as nothing more than we see farm animals. Meat. Food. Something we need to kill to survive.

If they don't have hosts, they don't exist any more than the hosts they steal do. They're little slugs who live in little pools of filthy water, unable to see or smell or taste, almost like plants, just soaking up sunlight and existing for no other purpose than to reproduce and die.

They call us meat. Cows. Chickens. Pigs.

Fine.

That doesn't mean we have to give up, let them slaughter us. If they are the wolves and we are the deer, that's fine. Because even prey animals get to fight back, and it is no less natural for us to survive than it is for them to attack. An elk can cave a wolf's skull in just as surely as that wolf's teeth can rip the elk's throat out.

Maybe it isn't morally wrong for them to take us as hosts. But that doesn't make it wrong for us to fight back.

There is balance in nature, and just because the Yeerks conquered the Hork-Bajir doesn't mean they'll succeed with us. It all comes down to luck, and strength, and the will to live.

And I want to live.

And I want to be recognized for what I am. I want my daemon to be recognized for what it is.

So, even if it is natural for everyone to assume my daemon is male, or even female, it's also natural for me to feel angry, and sad, and frustrated, and it's natural, too, for me to want to change that.

Sometimes the wolf takes down the deer. Sometimes the deer takes down the wolf. Sometimes I can ignore it, can run away and not look back, and flee those chasing teeth.

But sometimes, I can't. Sometimes I'm backed into a corner, where I can't run away, can't ignore the teeth lunging for my neck, and I have to take a stand. I have to lash out, I have to defend myself, because I'm tired of running and tired of hiding and I just want to be recognized. I don't want to have to keep explaining myself to strangers when they assume too much, I don't want to keep getting weirded out, confused looks thrown my way when I try to explain. I'm tired of the scorn, tired of the confusion, tired of the disbelief and the disdain.

My daemon is not male or female. My daemon is an it. And maybe it's not normal, but it _is_ natural. Just because I've never met anyone else like me doesn't mean that there is something wrong with me, doesn't mean I'm unnatural, or bad, or sick. I don't need curing, because there's nothing to fix.

I am me. Tinyel is Tinyel. And that's okay. That's more than okay.

And I want to let the rest of the world know that. I want them to know who I am, what I have done, and what I can do.

Standing in the shower, trying to get blood out of my hair that isn't actually there, watching the steam rise off the tile from the scalding, soapy water, there is nothing that I want to do more than scream it to the world.

Sometimes it feels like everything is collapsing out from under me, and I want to scream. I want to scream, and scream, and scream until my throat is raw and I can't scream anymore. I want to claw at my arms for the memories that circle around and around my brain until I can't escape. I struggle to breathe, because sometimes my lungs forget that they aren't still filled with dust and splinters of wood. I can barely stand being in enclosed spaces now, because it makes my brain remember the time the floor really did fall out from under me, and every now and then, if someone touches me on the arm, I just want to cry in shame. Because I couldn't control my morphing at all, and not even my usual morphing outfit that I always wore under my clothes managed to survive.

When the firefighters finally pulled me out of the wreckage of what had once been my kitchen, I was bruised and bleeding, almost unconscious, and completely naked. I had to be pulled out of the wreckage completely naked and half-dead while my entire family and more than half the neighborhood looked on, before someone covered me with a blanket and got me on a gurney.

To everyone's credit, they seemed to be more concerned with the fact that I was half dead, than the fact that I was naked.

It doesn't change the fact that I was, though. And now, if someone looks at me the wrong way, or happens to touch my arm as they walk past-where I felt the firefighter's fingers curl as they pulled me out-my eyes get hot and my throat tries to clog.

It's ridiculous.

I've killed more people than I can count. Maimed more. I've watched my friends get torn to pieces and dragged my own steaming guts along the ground. I've felt skulls crack beneath my feet and watched the brains cling to the ground, and then to my toes, afterwards. I've felt all of the bones in my body rearrange themselves, and I've had my own limbs ripped off right in front of my eyes. I've bled almost to death, I've been shot, I've been stabbed, I've been burned, I can't even count how many times my heart has stopped.

But it always just comes back to that moment. I felt the firefighter's gloved fingers curl around my arm as they dug me out, as they pulled me from the wreckage. I was too weak to even move, too weak to do anything but cry.

The sky was grey, the black of night thrown back by the glare of spotlights and the flashing red of police cruisers and ambulances. There was a crush of voices, off farther away, held back by nothing but some flimsy yellow tape and police officers. I could only lie there, bruised, bleeding, completely naked, helpless to move to free myself from the debris that had trapped me, too weak to do anything but silently cry as the firefighters pulled me out of the damage I had caused.

I couldn't even move as they loaded me onto a gurney, as they finally covered me with a blanket.

One of my paramedics was trying to talk to me, but I couldn't focus on what they were saying. I could still feel the crushing weight of my house piled up on top of my chest, and I thought that if I opened my mouth to speak, I'd suffocate.

And then something warm touched my hand, and suddenly the words my ears refused to understand made sense.

They wanted to know where my daemon was.

And Tinyel appeared, sinking out of my shadow like water to take the form of a dog, limping and bloody and whimpering. It had hidden when I started to morph, but I'd been too scared, felt the wounds too deeply, couldn't block out the pain in my confusion and fear. Not even turning into a shadow had spared it from the fall, from the wood and concrete and the glitching technology that wasn't made for human beings in the first place.

It felt like my entire body had been beaten to a pulp, ripped apart and sewn back together without anesthesia. The fact that Tinyel was still on its feet was a miracle in and of itself.

I guess the paramedics were used to weird stuff happening with daemons, because they didn't make a big deal out of Tinyel's sudden appearance. Maybe they just thought it had been a bug, hiding in my hair, or a flea, clinging to my skin.

Either way, it didn't take long for them to load us into the ambulance, and then we were on our way to the hospital.

It didn't even occur to me until we had already arrived that this would mean I'd be sitting out on Animorphs missions for the near future. My injuries were on record. My sisters had seen the bruises and the cuts, the nurses and doctors had seen my cracked ribs and broken arm and wrist, and now I had the stitches and bandages and cast to prove it.

I couldn't morph, because if I did, then all of my very public injuries would heal, and I wouldn't have any way of explaining that wouldn't blow my cover and doom the entire human race to extinction.

But...that was okay with me.

I'd gotten used to pain, learned to ignore it, learned to tuck it away safely in the back of my mind so that I could face it later, in the form of nightmares and flashbacks and panic attacks. Whatever protected my daemon from receiving the same wounds was worth it. So, yeah. I could handle cracked ribs and a messed up arm. I could stand the cuts and bruises.

It would be harder to handle the waiting, the complete lack of movement as I was confined to bedrest, but I would handle it. I would have to, because I hadn't had any time to prepare myself like I did before missions. Tinyel had caught my broken ribs and arm, and all the cuts and bruises the way kids gave each other colds. And no matter what form it took, that pain still carried over, rearranging itself to match whatever biology it took on. Not even becoming a snake could completely lessen the pain from our arm, because then it just became a phantom ache, somewhere off to the side of its scales but still ever-present and inescapable.

This was why we always planned out our missions so carefully, and why doing things spur of the moment was only reserved for the most urgent cases. We had to prepare ourselves, mentally. Block out everything but the mission, block out pain and fear and any emotion stronger than anger. Because if we were caught unprepared, like I had with my suddenly out of control morphing, if we got too afraid, if we felt the pain too sharply, if we let the trauma infect us in that split second, the wounds would become more than physical.

They would transfer over to our daemon. And our daemons couldn't heal themselves just by changing their shape. They couldn't morph. And that meant that if my arm got ripped off and I really _thought_ about what that meant as it was happening, if I let all of that horror and fear engulf me in that moment, Tinyel would permanently lose a limb.

We'd all learned that the hard way, during our fourth real mission, when Cassie and Tobias had started having dreams about an Andalite calling to them from the bottom of the ocean.

We'd been stupid, unprepared, high on the confidence and playfulness of the dolphins we'd acquired.

And now Macalia was permanently deformed, her skin twisted and knotted right around where her waist was in whatever form she took on. As long as she kept to a form with thick fur, no one noticed. But if you were to look closely, if she turned into something with short fur or scales or feathers, or if she _wanted_ you to see them, you could look at her, and trace the pattern with your eyes, and you would see that the scar wrapped around her entire body, in a perfect mimicry of shark teeth.

Marco's dolphin morph had been bitten almost clean in half. The only thing keeping his tail connected to the rest of his body were a few useless strings of flesh and intestines. I'd watched shattered shards of bones drift away from the gaping hole in his body, sparkling in the sunlight that cut through the water as the slowly drifted deeper in the water that was quickly turning red with blood.

It was the first injury any of us had sustained while in a morph, the first time we actually tested the theory that the DNA would refresh itself when we demorphed. We were stupid, we were careless, we were _children_. Marco would have died if our theory had been proven wrong. He almost _did_ die. If it hadn't been for Aximili and his super advanced Andalite healing technology, Macalia would have bled to death instead of just having a massive scar wrapped around her body. Marco could heal himself by morphing, but his daemon couldn't. If it hadn't been for Aximili, Marco would have died, not a single mark on his body to show you why.

We would have had to explain to his father that his son was dead, lost to the open ocean, the same way as his wife. We would have had to go to his funeral and know as they lowered his casket into the ground that it was all our fault.

We wouldn't make mistakes like that ever again. We couldn't afford to. The Andalite healing machine had been lost with the rest of the Dome when the Yeerks descended on our rescue mission and obliterated any trace of its existence.

Now, I know that if any psychologist ever read about what we were doing, they'd be tearing their hair out and screaming bloody murder from the rooftops. But it's not like we have any other choice. It's either repress all emotion, or go into battle whacked out on drugs or alcohol.

It does its job, it keeps us alive. And that is what matters in our war.

We aren't just normal soldiers that a general sends out hoping to overwhelm the enemy with numbers. If one of us goes down, our chances of saving the planet go down with them. There are only a few of us, so we have to do everything in our power to stay alive and healthy. We have to keep fighting for more than our own survival. This goes beyond us.

And the pain always comes back to us in the end, so it's not like we're getting a get out of jail free card. There will be plenty of stuff for us to confess to therapists when this whole thing is over. They'll want us to spill our guts, and fine, we will. I will, at least. But in the meantime, I'd prefer not die every time a Hork-Bajir manages to get in a lucky slash across my stomach.

When Jake and Cassie came to visit me-came to visit his cousin who had almost died, and her best friend, because that's what we had to make everyone think we were, because we couldn't let them know that their children had been turned into soldiers-I could tell that they were surprised, and also seriously concerned. When they told me I'd have to lay it low for a while, and my immediate response _wasn't_ to argue, they got even more concerned.

And-though they wouldn't admit it, suspicious.

They didn't react in any way that would show me, we'd all been forced to become perfect actors. But I knew them, and I knew what they were thinking. Rachel? Agreeing to sit out a mission? Uh uh, no way. Apocalyptically bad news.

I could try to justify myself, say that if I morphed I'd be blowing my cover. But since when had common sense ever stopped me before?

The truth was, I was _afraid_ to morph again. I'd never felt so helpless before in my entire life. But I couldn't just tell them that. I was supposed to be the strong one, the one that never flinched and never backed down and never let on how much all of this got to me. I had to be the strong one for them, so that they could be weak.

But I was forced to explain myself, even if it was stupidly difficult. Otherwise, they'd have to kidnap me out of the hospital and drag me out to the woods and put me under guard for three days to make absolutely sure I hadn't been infested. I couldn't blame them. All they knew at that point was that my house had mysteriously collapsed, with me inside, and that I had been hospitalized as a result. For all they knew, it had been an ambush by the Yeerk's, which I had lost, and the jig was up. Bye bye humanity.

I had to tell them something, even if I didn't know what had caused it or why it had happened in the first place.

"Something's-wrong with me." I managed to bite out, looking anywhere but in their eyes, trying and failing to grasp at that mental shield that fell over me just before a fight, protecting me from the pain, "I couldn't-" A deep breath through a throat that suddenly felt constricted, and I had to stop, suddenly feeling too light. My heart was pounding in my chest, and hot, numbing tingles were racing up and down my arms.

I knew what this was. I'd had plenty of panic attacks ever since the night I watched an alien prince get eaten alive right infront of me with no way to stop it, the telepathic screams he couldn't hold back searing through my brain. For a while, I considered going vegetarian. Every time I saw a piece of raw meat I just...I couldn't handle it. I told my mom that I'd watched a racoon get hit by a car when she caught on. It's taken a while, but I can finally help my mom with the cooking again, even if sometimes I get a flash of screaming burst through my mind when we're making roast beef.

Long story short, I know what a panic attack feels like.

But this was too similar to what had happened to me just before I began morphing out of control in my bedroom, and that made it infinitely worse. My breathing sped out of control, and before I knew it, I was hyperventilating, clutching at my chest and feeling my heart pounding against my ribs.

They recognized what it was too. Funera transformed into a tiger and put her paws up on the foot of the bed, locking her amber gaze with mine and baring her teeth in a snarl as an almost-silent growl vibrated in her throat.

But I couldn't hold her gaze like I normally did, couldn't slip back into that mental state where all that mattered was completing the mission, and following the commands of my leader.

Instead, I felt something else happening. It was like a weight was crawling up my spine, so heavy that I was forced to bend over double, bracing my one uninjured arm against the mattress to stay upright, new terror sparking in my chest and making me want to scream and thrash and run for my life.

And then I felt the weight settle in my mind, and the world went weird as the crocodile opened its eyes.

I was shoved off to the side as the crocodile stared down at the sheets bunched up in my hand in absolute confusion. It held my body perfectly still for a few seconds, and I could feel its rising fear in time to the still pounding beat of my heart.

I was beyond fear, beyond panic. I was suddenly trapped in my own body, not by a Yeerk, but by a _morph_. The realization crashed over me with the force of a tsunami, and suddenly, I just _knew_.

This was the same crocodile I had morphed at the Gardens, and the same one I had morphed again in my bedroom. I recognized it.

And it seemed to recognize me. I felt its mind twitching in my direction, and for a second, I regained control of my body.

But only for a second, only long enough to reach out towards Tinyel before the crocodile was suddenly in control again, my reaching hand frozen in mid air and shaking.

In that split second of control, Tinyel had transformed. Into a leopard slug, the signal we had devised to warn others that we were being controlled. Now that the crocodile was back in control, my daemon had frozen as stiff as a board, unable to speak or move to explain. But that single second of control had been enough.

Jake's expression went cold, within an instant. And the snarl wrapped around Funera's mouth turned real, turned angry and afraid and loud. I felt it vibrating through the bed and into my bones.

Through it all, the crocodile just sat there, staring at my outstretched hand. Staring down at the cast holding my other arm in place, restricting its movement. It just sat there are stared. Until, that is, Alexander turned into a lemur and wrapped his fingers around Tinyel, picking it up off the bed as gently as a mother carried her child.

Then the crocodile flinched back, opening my mouth and letting out a shocked garble of noises that meant nothing, and yet perfectly conveyed the emotion of fear.

It didn't know what Tinyel was, didn't know why it could feel those gentle lemur fingers wrapped around my body, the body it was currently in. It didn't understand the emotions we could feel coming from Cassie through Alexander's contact with Tinyel, it didn't understand anything that was happening at all. It was so confused, and so afraid. But not as afraid as I was.

It opened its mouth again, and I felt my own human instincts take over its confused and frightened mind as Jake, suddenly cold and emotionless, moved closer, his mouth set in a firm line, his eyes almost blank. I should have recognized it before. The crocodile swung my head, staring around the room in mounting terror, and for a second I caught a glimpse of the expression on Cassie's face.

Or rather, the complete lack of expression.

They had come prepared. As they should have, because walking into this situation acting like nothing could possibly be the matter would have been suicide. I'd already been compromised. If they had gone in without a plan we would have been down three Animorphs, and the planet would have been doomed.

Cassie reached over and placed her hand on my arm, and let the barest flicker of emotion enter her voice when she said softly, "Don't worry, Rachel. We'll get it out of you."

The crocodile tried to yank free of her hold, opening my mouth but not letting out any sound other than a weak hiss, but she was too strong, too firm in her resolve.

And then a feeling of peace swept over me, swept over the crocodile, and my eyes fell shut as the crocodile's mind suddenly fell backward, granting me control of my body _just_ in time for the world to go black.

* * *

I was dreaming. Or remembering. I'm not sure which.

I was sitting in my chair infront of my computer, suffocating as my lungs shrank and twisted and disappeared, with no idea what was happening to me or why. I watched crocodile scales rip through my skin without willing them to, watched my face bulge out into a snout filled with teeth that wanted to tear and rend without my permission.

I grew so large that I was crushed painfully against the walls of my suddenly too-small room, while thoughts that didn't belong to me stirred and gathered, rising up, trying to take control of what I suddenly realized was no longer my body.

I had become the crocodile. It wasn't me in a morph, it was the crocodile. It wasn't just the crocodile's instincts taking over as my brain became different, it was the crocodile's mind, actively fighting against mine.

And it was winning.

A strangled cry escaped my throat, and I suddenly found myself jolting upright-or at least, slightly _more_ upright.

Even with the aftereffects of my nightmare-memory still fogging my brain, it only took me a few seconds to realize that I was tied to a chair, and that Tinyel had been placed in a box made of cedarwood. I could feel the weight of its comforting aura sitting on my thoughts and slowing them down, making me feel like I was sitting in class, trying and failing to keep my eyes open after a late-night mission and not nearly enough sleep.

Tinyel was already out, drifted off to sleep in the form of...something. I wasn't entirely sure, but I knew it was more than one animal mixed together.

Great. Just great.

Because the others really needed more reasons to think that I was some kind of nut.

I tried to focus on the situation at hand. This was important. The others knew I wasn't in control of my body, but they thought it was a Yeerk. How could I explain to them that no, it wasn't a Yeerk, it was something entirely new?

And all of a sudden, I really felt the weight of those ropes around my wrists, around my legs and chest and neck. They'd been careful with my broken arm and wrist, and had wrapped bandages around my various stitches to keep them clean, but I couldn't move even if I wanted to.

Good thing I didn't want to.

I drew in a breath to try and wake myself up a bit more, then immediately regretted it when pain blossomed in my chest, reminding me that I'd messed up not only my arm, but my ribs as well.

That explained the ice pack that was tied loosely to my side with more bandages. At least my friends were trying to spare me any more pain than was strictly necessary. But I was supposed to be in the hospital for a _reason_. The pain filled my whole body, barely there thanks to the pain medication that was still in my system, but just noticeable enough that I knew that moving would be an absolutely horrific plan.

I didn't want to move. I didn't want to move, because my ribs were messed up, and moving would hurt. I didn't want to move, because leaving me here by myself was a test, and one I couldn't afford to fail.

But god, I really hated the feeling of those ropes restraining me. It was too much like the weight of my house crushing me to the ground.

So I closed my eyes, blocking out the sight of the dirt walls and wooden support beams around me, and the feeling of being watched, and tried to breathe slowly and evenly.

I focused on the feeling of flying. Of being free and weightless in the air and completely in control. A single twitch of a single feather could change my direction. I could speed after prey faster than a human could blink. I was a goddess among the clouds, fierce and strong and free.

I focused on the feeling of the wind beneath my broad wings, lifting me higher and higher until anyone looking up would have seen nothing more than a speck in the distance. But I would be able to see them. I could even read over their shoulder if I wanted to. I was an eagle, and I was unstoppable.

It worked. The panic that had started welling up in my chest began to fade, and I could breathe easily again, as long as I didn't breathe in too suddenly or deeply.

I kept my eyes closed for a few seconds longer, searching again for that steely calm that fell over me before a fight. It was so familiar, I could almost imagine it like a coat of armour waiting in my mind.

But just like each time before, it slipped away like water through my fingers.

It was then that I heard the soft sound of paws across the dirt, and opened my eyes to watch Jake in his tiger morph and Funera in the same form come stalking in through the doorway a few feet infront of me.

This was a room we had constructed ourselves, taking a page out of the Yeerk's book and building a secret base hidden safely underground. It had taken almost a week straight of digging and shoring up the walls with the help of various morphs, but now we had an area roughly twenty feet by twenty feet to call our own, separated into different rooms. There were two entrances. The first-the main one-could only be traversed by morphing into a snake or a mole or something else small. The second one, which Tobias usually used, was built into Aximili's scoop, and had a doorway big enough for a human-or Andalite-to pass through. This one was much more difficult to get to than the main entrance, which was, of course, the whole point.

That was the entrance used for bringing captives to the hideout, which we had nicknamed "the Dig". It was rare that we managed to capture a Controller alive, but whenever the opportunity arose, we were always quick to take it. We had a room specifically designed to hold captured Controllers, complete with all the amenities you could hope to find in a cave made out of dirt. Meaning that they got a portapotty, a bucket of water and soap, and a cushion on the floor to use as a bed. If they tried to drown themselves in the bucket-which, admittedly, only one Controller had tried so far-they lost the privilege of washing their hands.

After the first full day of captivity, we gave the Controller a choice.

Leave the host willingly, or refuse to admit defeat, and suffer another two days of agonizing pain as they slowly starved to death.

If they left the host willingly, they would be given to the Chee, and either placed in the Yeerk pool they had constructed in their underground dog park, or "given" a Chee as a host, so that they could at least have the semblance of existence outside the water through the use of holograms.

At the end of the war, they would be turned back over to the rest of the Yeerks. If they wanted to live, they had to cooperate.

If not, well...They knew what would happen if they had to go another two days without Kandrona rays.

Most of the Yeerks chose the first option, and both Yeerk and host were spirited away to safety with the Chee. Where the hosts went after that was a secret that even we didn't know, just to add another layer of security.

But rescuing hosts wasn't the only purpose for the Dig. We used it for storing things and planning missions, and every now and then, just to get away from the rest of the world.

Mostly though, we just stocked up on things. Food, clothing, medical supplies, and books on different animals. Like I said before, Aximili had set up what he called his "scoop" nearby, and was slowly working on recording the details of every alien animal he could think of, in case Visser Three ever morphed into one of them someday, and we had to go up against it.

Unfortunately, he'd admitted to falling asleep often in his "exo-biology" class back on the Andalite homeworld, so he wasn't exactly an expert on alien animals. But he wrote down everything he could, and that was better than nothing.

Anything was better than nothing.

I sat there in my chair, and watched Jake walking towards me, his large paws kicking up little bursts of dust with every step, kicking up the little motes of diatomaceous earth that covered the floor.

Harmless to animals, deadly to insects. Microscopic shards of glass that would slice open the toughest carapace with ease and dry out the bug's insides. Just one of the traps we'd laid for ourselves. Better dead than a traitor, better dead than with the death of the entire planet on your head.

This room I was in was special. It wasn't the room we used for prisoners of war. This was the room that had been set aside just for the horrible purpose of getting a Yeerk out of one of us.

It had already happened once, to Jake, but that was before we built the Dig, before we were really prepared for the consequences of this war.

Jake's amber eyes were locked with mine as he paced ever forward, graceful and sleek and deadly, and I held his gaze. I wasn't sure there was any way for me to get out of this without having to wait the three days it would take to prove that I wasn't infested, any way for me to explain that they had it only slightly wrong.

They'd left me ungagged, if only for the moment. That could change. I had to choose my words carefully, find some way to convince them that I was telling the truth. Was there any way for me to prove that I wasn't actually infested? The only way we ever knew for sure was if we saw a Controller acting out of character for their host. Usually when there was a meeting for the Sharing, the Yeerk's front and way of recruiting new hosts, and outright admitted it.

The Sharing pretended to be like this cool club dedicated to having fun and helping people and the environment. You'd go to cookouts and picnics and outings at first, maybe clean up roads or the beach, have lots of fun with people that were always friendly and open. But once you became a full member? Then you got your head dunked in a tank and became a slave to your own personal human-Controller.

I had to stay calm. Any Yeerk in this situation would probably be freaking out.

And I didn't have a lot of time. Who was to say when the crocodile's mind would resurface? Who's to say it would be as confused as it was in the hospital? Who was to say I wouldn't begin morphing uncontrollably again? Who was to say the crocodile wouldn't take over and go on a bloodthirsty rampage?

I waited until Jake sat down just infront of my feet, his head tilted up to look at me.

It was sort of funny, despite the situation. I'd never realized it before, but even sitting down, I was still taller than him.

"Jake." I said, trying to keep my words level and even, trying to keep my emotions out of it, speaking quickly so he wouldn't have a chance to interrupt and waste precious time, "You need to get Aximili. There's something wrong with me, and it isn't a Yeerk."

One of his ears twitched, and I read it as a laugh, bitter and sarcastic. But I couldn't let that dissuade me. I pushed on earnestly. I explained what had happened to me, how I had started morphing out of control. I explained-even though saying the words made my skin crawl and my heart race-how I'd gone from sitting at my computer surfing the web to suddenly suffocating as my lungs began to go through the first changes of a morph I hadn't planned, hadn't wanted. I explained how I'd gone from crocodile to fly to elephant without even stopping to go back to human in between.

And I told him about the revelation in the hospital room, while he thought I was fighting back against a Yeerk. I told him about the crocodile, and how it had been fighting me for control in my room, and how it had so very easily shoved me to the side in the hospital. It wasn't a Yeerk, it was a morph. It was as though the crocodile was morphing into me, instead of the other way around.

I begged him to tell Aximili, to ask him if this was something he'd ever heard of before.

But Jake just sat there, staring at me with those unblinking amber eyes, saying nothing, just sitting there and staring at me silently. Funera wasn't any better. She was like a mirror to him, unflinching and completely inscrutable.

If he believed or doubted me, he gave no sign.

Then, suddenly, another shape appeared in the doorway, a lithe and graceful silhouette against the lights strung up in the small hallway.

Imagine a centaur from all those myths and fairy tales you read when you were a kid, except completely covered in blue fur that was thicker around the waist and legs, and thinning out into the barest down at the chest and face.

Imagine an almost triangular head sculpted around two massive almond-shaped green eyes, with no mouth, and only slits like gills in the middle to serve as a nose.

Imagine above that first pair of eyes was what seemed at first glance to be some type of horn or antenne-only to realize that they were a second pair of eyes, held up above the head on thick stalks like, ironically enough, a snail's. These stalk eyes never stopped moving, and were completely independant of each other. At any moment, the creature could be looking at you, and behind itself, and up at the sky. It could pull them down towards its head, deflating them like balloons if something was attacking its eyes specifically.

Imagine long-but weak, almost child-like-arms that ended in too many fingers. Imagine what, as weird as it sounded, looked like an angel. Peaceful and calm. Like it had nothing to worry about, and never would.

Until you noticed the tail, arching up over its back. Powerful and strong, and ending in a razor sharp blade of bone that glittered even in the dimmest lighting, covered in tiny facets and edges like a diamond.

What you just imagined is called an Andalite. And specifically, our friend and fellow warrior, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill-or just Aximili for short.

Notice how I didn't describe the shape of his daemon.

Because you see, Aximili isn't human. And more than that, he wasn't born on Earth. He's an alien, in every sense of the word. He comes from a completely different culture, and an entirely different _planet_.

On the Andalite home-world-whose name exists as nothing more than the feeling of _home_ -they don't have daemons that take the form of animals, like most do here on Earth. On the Andalite home-world, it was truly their _home,_ not just somewhere they had to fight to survive.

When Aximili first got here, he called the Earth a Death-Planet. We never really could understand _why_ , until he explained to us what it was like on his planet. The Andalites had no natural predators, no areas with extreme weather patterns, and very little temperature variation except at the farthest reaches of the poles.

Whereas on Earth, pretty much any large carnivore-and some not-so-large ones-would happily chow down on people if it got the chance. Just last week there was a story about a toddler getting snatched up by a crocodile in the news. The kids' parents had ignored all of the warning signs plastered over the beach not to go near the water at night, and their poor kid had paid the price for their own carelessness and stupidity.

Humans had been looking to animals for inspiration or blessings for as long as we'd existed. There was always something out there that was faster than we were, bigger than we were. Something that could fly or see in the dark or swim or sneak up silently behind its prey. Humans had always been looking to animals for symbols, ways to describe the world around them, ways to describe themselves. Because they wanted to be more than they were, they wanted to be part of something bigger.

But it wasn't like that on the Andalite home-world. They _were_ the strongest, they _were_ the fastest. Nothing could sneak up on them, because they could look all around them. Nothing ever _would_ want to sneak up on them. They didn't see animals the way we did. They didn't really see anything the way we did. Not even war, not even battle.

But they were the ones that had created the morphing technology, and that was my only hope at figuring out what was wrong with me.

Because now, the same kind of animal that had stolen a child from the sands was in my body, and had already beaten me for the reigns of control twice. I couldn't feel the crocodile's mind right then, but who was to say when it would wake up again?

The relief that Aximili had come-hopefully to interrogate me-was palpable, and I had to grin at him, despite the seriousness of the situation and the ropes still holding me in place, and the pain in my arm and chest.

Aximili was as close to an expert on the morphing technology as we could get. He would know what was wrong with me, and how to fix it. He would know how to fix me. He would.

...Assuming, of course...that he'd been paying attention in class the day they were learning about it in school.

The truth is, Aximili isn't any more of an adult than we are. He's just a kid, just like us. I'm not sure exactly how old he is, or even if it would translate over well into "human years". But from what he's told us, he's the same age as the rest of us, give or take a year. If he'd been human, he would have been in the same grade as us.

Yeah, I know. The thought of the fate of the planet getting left up to a couple thirteen and fourteen year olds (give or take a year) doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either, but we've been doing pretty well for ourselves so far. None of us have died yet, so there's that at least.

As long as Aximili knew what was wrong with me, I would be fine. He would probably create some ridiculously advanced technology from spare parts from a garbage dump, and then scoff at us when we couldn't understand how it was supposed to work. Say what you want about Andalites, but they've definitely got a superiority complex going.

Which, now that I thought about it, probably had something to do with that whole no-natural-predators thing...

Aximili walked farther into the room, his posture and pace deceptively delicate. If you couldn't see his tail, you'd think he was just like a cute little deer centaur or something, the way he walked. He sort of reminded me of a cat-he always looked so sure of himself, so in control. Like nothing bothered him and nothing made him afraid.

And then I had to remind myself that I'd been a cat before, and they had plenty of fear.

He stopped next to Jake and Funera, his eyestalks swiveling around to look down at them, and his main eyes focused on me.

He spoke so that we could all hear him, as was polite. It wasn't like the volume of his speech changed or anything, but you could just instinctively _tell_ when what you were hearing was "private" thought-speak, or "public".

Public, of course, meaning that it only included us Animorphs. We couldn't risk thought-speaking to anyone else, or else they could figure out our real identities. We especially never gave in to the urge to speak to Visser Three. As the only Andalite-controller in existence, he would be able to instantly tell if he heard our voices whether or not we were true Andalites.

It was the first thing Aximili had told us when we met him. We'd broadcast our thought-speak into the dome he was trapped in, and when he finally spoke back to us, his first question was, saturated with confusion and curiosity, _‹What are you?›_

Just like you could tell when someone was speaking to you privately, you could tell when it was an Andalite speaking, or something else. Andalites, they didn't….well, they didn't have a real _language_ , per se. It was more like they projected out feelings and concepts, and then the morphing technology translated them into words that we as humans could understand. Other Andalites, of course, didn't need it translated, because that was how they normally spoke.

When Aximili spoke to us, he was speaking with pictures and feelings and concepts. Then our brains translated them into words. When we spoke to him, we used words, which then got translated into the appropriate feelings and concepts for him to understand.

You had to really pay attention to notice the difference, but it was there. Almost like a delay, but not quite. It was had to describe. But it was there.

And there was absolutely no way in hell that Visser Three would fail to notice it. He was a Yeerk controlling an Andalite body. Neither species had their own natural spoken language, so if he heard thought-speak that was going from words to concepts, he would know within an instant that we weren't the Andalite bandits he thought we were.

This was why none of us were ever allowed to speak to him, no matter what. Not even Aximili. Because if the rest of us remained silent, and only Aximili thought-spoke to him, Visser Three would find that strange. He would find that very strange indeed. Especially if it ever became clear that Aximili wasn't our leader.

We each had our own favorite "battle morphs" as we called them, but every now and then we tried to switch it up, tried not to keep the same morph for every single fight. We all had our own fighting styles, and if we always used the same morph _and_ used the same strategies, the Yeerks would be able to predict our actions and take us out easily.

So while Jake was the first one to acquire a tiger morph, as soon as Aximili reassured us that there was no known limit to how many morphs a single person could have-the highest record of morphs ever recorded was well within the thousands, held by the Andalite equivalent of a biologist-we all went back into the Gardens in an actual planned out stealth mission one night, and acquired the rest of the tigers in the enclosure, including the one Jake had originally gotten. Now, all of us had not one, but five different tigers floating around in us, just waiting to be morphed.

We'd learned-by accident, really-that you could morph more than one animal from the same species. That was something the Andalites had never thought to test, for some reason, but it helped us all the same.

Now when we went into battle, the Yeerks could never really be sure how we would act. We stayed in one morph only just long enough for the enemy to get used to our strategies-and then we switched for our next fight, and decimated them in the resulting confusion and mayhem.

We hadn't stopped with acquiring the tigers, though. Any species we could get our hands on, we acquired. Each of us was responsible for keeping track of how many morphs we had available at any given time, and any time we found a new one that proved particularly useful, we had to show the others where to find it.

We had to set up some ground rules, of course. Like only acquiring another member of the same species if it was either for security purposes-like with the tigers or our other battle morphs-or if the new morph was significantly stronger or faster than the original. Like if your first dog morph was just a normal, slightly overweight pet, and then you got lucky-or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it-enough to get your hands on a trained police K9 unit bred and trained for combat and tracking. Or if it was just the opposite-if you had a killer war machine and needed something more casual for everyday missions that required going around in public in morph. Like the difference between my original bald eagle and my newer mourning dove.

When he spoke, Aximili's voice was excited. I chose to take that as a good sign.

‹Prince Jake!› He said, his stalk eyes still focused on Jake and Funera, and his main eyes smiling at me in that way that only Andalites could, ‹I am pleased to inform you that what Rachel is describing is a common problem with morphing. It would appear that she has acquired a morph that she is allergic to.›

Even though the room was silent before he spoke, the silence that followed it just seemed even _more_ quiet. You could feel the confusion in the air.

Either Jake said something to him that he didn't let me hear, or Aximili could tell how confused we were by himself, because he elaborated, filling my head with a telepathic silence for a few seconds that was the Andalite equivalent of hesitation.

‹...She perfectly described the symptoms of a morph-allergy in details that no Yeerk would have access to. We will of course need to make certain, but I believe that we can now safely assume that she is not infested, but instead allergic to a new morph. It would explain the destruction of her scoop, if she used her elephant morph while inside it.›

I had to speak up then, if only to correct him, mentally shying away the idea that I had destroyed my house and almost gotten myself and the rest of my family killed _on purpose_.

"I didn't _use_ the morph." I said flatly, afraid that if I raised my voice at all they would be given cause to doubt me again, " _It_ used _me_."

Aximili blinked his main eyes, looking surprised. Then he smiled again. ‹That is correct, Rachel. It is quite clear that you are allergic to your recently acquired crocodile DNA, and your body is attempting to expel that DNA. Like a-›

He paused for a second, furrowing his brow and tilting his eyes up towards the ceiling thoughtfully.

‹-Like a sneeze.› He finally said, nodding to himself before turning to face Jake fully. ‹You humans sneeze when you are sick or if you breathe in something harmful, in an attempt to remove it from your body. The same thing is happening to Rachel. She is allergic to the crocodile DNA, so her body is attempting to be rid of it by morphing into the creatures that she is _not_ allergic to. Eventually, she will…›

Again, he hesitated, filling my head with telepathic static as he searched for the right word. Then the static suddenly turned a little bit...unsure.

‹...Hopefully, her body will forcefully expel the DNA on its own, like a sneeze.› He said, his voice definitely unsure now. He shrugged helplessly, a gesture he had picked up from us. ‹There is a process that we Andalites normally go through in these situations, called burping DNA. We morph into the animal we are allergic to, while retaining our Andalite form. It takes some time for our body to adjust to the morph, to realize that it cannot fit. It tries to change the morph into something that it can work with, something that will not harm it. Like fighting off an illness. Your body learns how to defeat it, and then it is no longer a threat.›

He looked at me again. ‹When you began to morph into the crocodile in your scoop, and again in the hospital, your body was attempting to tame it. This will most likely occur several more times, until either your body succeeds at taming the morph, or expels it once and for all. You can speed the process up by morphing into stable DNA patterns, so that your body has more templates to work with.› To Jake he said, ‹The process usually completes itself one way or the other within a few days, so for security purposes, I recommend keeping Cassie and Erek in place until the matter is resolved.›

Funera finally moved, the first time I had seen her do so since she entered the room She stood up and smiled, turning from a tiger into some type of sparrow within an instant.

I sank back against the chair in relief. If Funera was letting her guard down, that meant that I was in the clear. Mostly. They still had to make sure that I wasn't infested, but they probably wouldn't keep me tied up the entire time either.

It wasn't until Jake demorphed and Aximili gently picked Tinyel up out of the cedar box that I truly let myself relax though.

Of course, that changed once I was untied and Tinyel was back in my arms, still drowsy, still half asleep, and still mismatched bits of different animals.

It started out with what looked like the head of an aardvark, but then the fur on its neck went to smooth, white and pale pink scales, like a python. Where shoulders would normally be, there were instead several insect limbs poking out on each side, which I tentatively identified as tarantula legs. After that, I couldn't make heads or tails-no pun intended-of what my daemon's form was. It was changing even as I held it against my chest with my one good hand, going from thick fur beneath my fingers to short and rough, to scales, to leather and feathers, and everything in between.

But there was nothing violent or wrong about it. It was more like….waves lapping at the sand. It was calming, somehow.

It was nice.

Until Aximilie spoke up, as he was escorting me from the interrogation room to the much larger and much more comfortable recreation area.

‹Your daemon,› he said, stalk eyes pointed curiously at Tinyel pressed against my shoulder as it began to stir slightly, blinking its eyes open and letting a little more alertness flood my senses, ‹I have never observed a form quite like that. Would it be improper for me to ask what it is called?›

He seemed to shift away from me a bit when he said that last part, ducking his head a bit and angling his stalk eyes to look up at me. He was curious, and trying not to be rude. Daemons were still something difficult for him to fully grasp, and he hadn't been taught all the subtle forms of etiquette about them that we'd all grown up with.

He knew this big rules, it was the smaller ones he had trouble keeping up with.

If anyone else had asked, if anyone else had pointed it out, I would have been angry and embarrassed. But not Aximili, not when he just didn't understand, not when he was just asking a simple question and doing his best not to be rude.

He didn't know what it meant for someone's daemon to be mismatched like mine currently was. It was one thing for a kid's daemon to turn into something like a dragon when they were playing, but another thing completely for a teenager's to default to something unnatural when they were unconscious.

They say that the shape your daemon takes when you're asleep is a symbol of who you are, and a hint at what form it's going to settle into when you get older. A lot of parents went out of their way to take pictures of their kids and their daemons when they were asleep. It was like taking pictures of a kid's first steps, or first word, or anything else important like that.

If anyone else had been asking me why Tinyel turned into a mismatched pile of animals when we were unconscious, it would have been an accusation, something spoken out of fear or concern or anger.

But not with Aximili, not with Ax, who had no daemon, and didn't know any better.

So I answered him honestly, as we stopped in the doorway leading to what had become the rec room, my voice quiet so that it wouldn't carry.

"Sometimes, Tinyel turns into things there aren't words for." I said, watching as my daemon shook itself, fur and scales and feathers turning to black needles with the movement, before settling back down again as soft, thick skunk fur dotted with white spots. It smiled up at me, and nuzzled its head beneath my chin. I hugged it tighter, to the slight protest of my ribs, but not caring one single bit.

I felt like I owed Aximili a better answer, though, so when Tinyel jumped out of arms, circled around my feet once, and then scampered over to the couch we'd gotten at the trash dump, limping slightly, the cedar wood still pressing against us, and helping to dull the pain. I explained, following at a more sedate pace, "Usually, if someone's daemon changes into something that's not a normal animal, it means…." It meant that there was something wrong with them, that's what it meant. I knew it. Everybody knew it. But Ax didn't. "It usually means they're sick. Like, in the head. Or, or sometimes it just means they're...um..." I hesitated, hating myself. "Sometimes it just means they're...different. Special."

There must have been something in the tone of my voice, because he didn't question me further, and instead smiled again, and told me that I absolutely _had_ to come and watch TV with him.

It was an obvious change of subject, but I didn't put up a fight, partially because he had good taste in TV, and partially because I was distracted by my own stupid thoughts.

Special.

The word that started out so kind hearted, and turned into an insult. There were worse things to call it, of course.

But none were as widespread as special, none were still used by schools and administrations while everyone else pointed and laughed and twisted the meaning into something that was horrible and bad and shameful.

It was another thing about me that I'd started figuring out recently, as much as I wish I could have stayed in the dark.

But it made sense, it made a lot of sense. Too much sense.

I didn't want to be special. I didn't want to be treated the way everyone treated…people like them.

I hated to say it, hated to think it. But I couldn't help it.

Aximili, of course, didn't understand. Why would he? No one ever spoke the words to him, no one ever looked twice when he was in his human morph out in public and played with sounds or talked too-loudly about his favorite types of food or stumbled and tried to keep his balance and complained about only having two legs, and tried to walk around on his toes all the time, because he was so used to having hooves.

With him, it was something visible, obvious, and _loud_. Even if it was only partially true, people still saw him for what they thought he was, and they treated him differently because of it.

They looked away when he walked past them, did their best not to stare or make it too obvious that they were trying to ignore him, that they were only just tolerating his presence.

When he stole food from someone's plate at the mall, they were angry, but they tried to just shrug it off, tried to pretend like it was okay, tried to pretend like it hadn't happened and didn't matter. Tried to pretend he didn't exist.

I hated to think it, but I didn't want people to look at me the way they looked at Aximili.

He was lucky. He was an alien, he wasn't used to human interaction, he couldn't read the faces of strangers well enough to figure out what they thought of him whenever he went out with us in his human morph.

But I could. I caught every glance, every quick turning away, every smirk and scowl and annoyed glare.

It was something I'd been fighting with for a while. And lately, I'd started losing that fight.

This war was changing me, and changing the things I cared about. I cared that my daemon was neither male nor female.

...And I cared that I had to pretend to be something I wasn't.

It was something I'd been fighting with for a while. My mom had brought it up, one night, after she found me in the living room curled up on the couch with Tinyel wrapped around me as a snake, just sitting there with the TV on static, crying and trying and failing to be subtle about it.

I was crying because I'd almost died a few hours earlier, but I couldn't tell her that, so I had to go with another truth instead, another fear, another thing that set me apart from everyone else I knew.

I told her that Tinyel wasn't a boy. I told her that I'd tried to hide it, tried to pretend it was, but I couldn't do it anymore. I hated hiding, hated lying. To myself, and everyone around me. I told her that Tinyel wasn't a girl, either.

It was the first time I'd spoken the words aloud since that fateful day out in the snow.

And through my tears, she just...smiled softly, sadly. She hugged me and told me that it was okay, that I was okay, that Tinyel was okay.

And then she asked me if I remembered any of the doctors I had gone to as a child, if I remembered all of the tests they had run, all the questions they had asked me.

I'd almost forgotten, but one of the questions had stuck with me. It asked if I ever heard voices in my head, which confused me. Because wasn't that what thinking was? Hearing your voice, but in different ways?

I never could remember what I put down as my answer for that one.

Up until that moment, I'd completely forgotten about all of the doctors I'd been taken to after that day in the snow. Somehow my conscious memory had just skipped right past it, like fast forwarding past the commercials before a movie. But now I remembered-dozens of doctors offices, dozens of tests. They had me build shapes with red and white blocks, they asked me to tell them how many animals I knew, they asked me to read words and then repeat them back from memory, they had me do math problems, they tested so many things, it was no wonder I blocked the memory out.

And that night, after an almost-failed disaster of a mission, my mom finally explained to me what all those tests had been for.

She told me that I'd taken a long time to start talking after I was born, and that was what started it all. Combined with the snow incident, and it was almost confirmed. But they tested me anyways, just to make sure.

And they got their answer, my parents did.

And then they decided not to tell me, decided not to explain it to me. They decided that I didn't need the weight of that word hanging over me.

I was smart, so I didn't need to take special classes. The one time they tried, it ended in disaster. I was shoved into a room with a dozen other kids of all different ages, with only one teacher that didn't even have time to teach me anything. They pulled me out almost as soon as they put me in, and I forgot about it entirely.

But still, they didn't use the word when talking about me, because they wanted to spare me the knowledge. As if hiding it from me would make it go away.

They didn't see it coming that I would be too different to hide, even from myself.

They didn't think my daemon would be able to travel farther away from me than theirs could, they didn't think it would be able to take on more shapes than theirs could, they didn't think I would ever start to notice anything about myself that made me different from anyone else around me.

Sure, walking on my toes whenever I went up stairs was kind of weird, but it wasn't anything major. It was just a cute little quirk, and hey, it had gotten me into gymnastics, so it wasn't like it was a _bad_ thing. And sure, I was bad at making new friends, and other kids seemed to just hate me from the moment they met me no matter how friendly I tried to be, but kids were cruel, and bullying was pretty much inevitable in school anyways. And okay, maybe I did get a little creeped out if someone held eye contact with me for too long, and maybe I sometimes just got confused about the way people acted or thought, and maybe I hated talking on the phone because I feel like I can't understand someone as well if I can't see their face, but, well, those things were easy to ignore, easy enough to blame on other things.

It didn't mean I was…

I didn't act like Ax. I didn't play with sounds or constantly turn my head to see what was behind me. I didn't stumble around or steal people's food or talk too loudly.

But I was different from other people, in some way I couldn't describe. It was like we were thinking on two different frequencies, and I didn't know how to switch over to theirs. Sometimes they looked at me in a certain way, and I just knew that they could tell. I'd said something wrong or done something weird without even realizing it.

I'd known I was different from everyone around me my entire life. I'd known it ever since that day in the snow when I let slip how different I was, how casual I was about the whole thing. I'd known ever since that moment that I was different, I just didn't want to put a word to it, didn't want to label it.

Because as soon as I put a label on it, that would be all that people saw when they met me. They'd introduce me using that word, so that people could brace themselves before they had to interact with me. People would look at me like I didn't exist, and speak to me like I was a child. They'd treat me like an idiot, and they'd only want me around so that they could do their good deed for humanity.

I've seen the way people treat Ax.

I don't want anyone to look at me like that.

My parent's grand plan to protect me from the truth backfired. I knew that I was different, but I didn't know why.

So I came to the only conclusion possible: Something was wrong with me.

And especially now, that was starting to become clear. I saw the way Jake and Cassie looked at each other, and we all knew that Marco loved to flirt, and everyone around me seemed to be getting more and more interested in each other in a way I couldn't comprehend.

Sure, I could tell when a boy was cute, but why in the world would that compel me to _kiss_ him, or even hold his hand? Everyone I knew was always going on and on about how much they _liked_ someone else, and how they were totally going to ask them out. And when it was my turn? When they demanded to know who I was crushing on? I didn't have anything to say.

It was like we were all in a race, and while I'd been running at the same pace the whole time, suddenly everyone around me was speeding up, shooting off ahead of me to the finish line. And then when they got there, they all got up on top of this pedestal I couldn't hope to climb.

And then the questions about my daemon came up again, in a new vein that was even worse than before. Because people weren't allowed to question you too much about your daemon. That was too personal and private a taboo.

But they had no problems at all with questioning your sexuality, or lack thereof.

When I couldn't come up with an answer for which boy in school I'd rather date, when others started noticing my complete lack of interest in boys…

They got other ideas.

Just like with Tinyel. If it wasn't a boy, then, obviously, it was a girl.

If I didn't like boys, then, _obviously_ , I liked girls.

No in between, no option C, nothing that wasn't one or the other.

My daemon was an it, and took on mismatched forms when we were asleep. I didn't like boys or girls, and the thought of being in a romantic relationship was repulsive. The thought of holding hands or god forbid _kissing_ was even worse. And I didn't even want to _think_ about anything beyond that.

It was just another thing that was wrong with me, another thing that set me apart, another part of me that was wrong.

I just kind of figured, at first, that I was a late bloomer, like everyone always said to the kids who hadn't gotten taller or whose voices still cracked. I figured maybe there was something wrong with my hormones or something. Because the health teachers were always talking about hormones, weren't they? Hormones were what made us go through puberty in the first place, what made our bodies change and our daemons settle.

And what made us attracted to one another. Hormones were the reason Jake and Cassie looked at each other the way they did, and they made Marco flirt with every pretty girl he set his eyes on, and even what made boys get so dang angry and self-conscious when they realized that, even after their growth spurt, I was still taller than them.

Obviously, I was different. Obviously, there was something wrong with me.

That much I knew, just from figuring it out myself. It wasn't hard.

And then I told my mom about Tinyel, and she told me something about myself that I hadn't had a word for. There was a reason I was different, and it had a name. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't something that was wrong with me, it was just something that _was_.

It was like a law of the universe. Even before Sir Isaac Newton 'discovered' gravity, it was still there, it still existed and affected things.

The only difference was that now, there was a name to put to that force of nature. A word to describe that apple falling to the ground, an explanation.

But coming from her, who had tried to protect me from the word, it felt even worse than just knowing that I was different. She'd tried to protect me from the word, but now she was giving it to me and just expecting me to accept it.

It felt like an attack.

I felt like I'd failed her somehow, like I'd tried and failed and wasn't good enough to not deserve being slapped with the label she'd tried to hide from me in the first place.

I didn't want to admit it, not to myself or anyone else.

But Aximili didn't understand. He didn't know what people thought of him when he was out in public in his human morph. He didn't know what it meant that he acted the way he did, the way people looked at him.

But I did. I understood.

It had been months since my mom had finally revealed to me the thing I was still so afraid to admit. I didn't like it, and I didn't want it. The fact that she had tried to shield me from it in the first place told me just how bad it was.

But Ax and I were in the same boat, whether or not I would admit it, and whether or not he knew it.

So as Tinyel curled up on the arm of our couch from the dump, I carefully sat myself down on our rainbow of salvaged cushions next to my daemon, and tried to figure out where to start, or if I was even going to say anything at all.

My parents had tried to protect me, and look how that had ended up. Everyone thought that Aximili _was_ , so he at least needed to know about it, right? He deserved to know.

He sat down on the other end of the couch, folding his legs beneath him like a deer and leaning against the arm, his tail curled down so that it brushed the floor. He reached over to grab the remote, but I stopped him when I spoke up.

"Hey, Aximili?"

He paused, hand still outstretched for the remote, and looked over at me with all four of his eyes. ‹Yes, Rachel?›

I looked away, focusing instead on Tinyel, who crawled into my lap, sensing my thoughts. I buried my fingers in its fur, and just scratched it behind the ears, the rhythmic motion comforting me slightly. "You um...know what I said earlier? About how Tinyel sometimes turns into things that there aren't words for?"

I didn't know any other way to bring it up, or what I was really even going to say.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him nod as worry permeated the air. ‹I do.› He said in thought-speak, ‹Did...was my question upsetting?› He leaned his upper body towards me, forcing me to look up from Tinyel to see his expression suddenly earnest and frantic, his hands waving infront of him like he was trying to push something away from him, ‹I meant no offence, I was simply curio-›

"No, no, Ax," I interrupted quickly, "It's nothing like that. You didn't offend me. I just...I just wanted to…um. Try to explain it a little better, that's all." My voice got quiet towards the end, my nerves overtaking my confidence.

The worry in the air faded into relief, and Aximili visibly calmed, lowering his hands and taking a moment to breathe audibly through his nose. His stalk eyes were swiveling around the room, refusing to look at me, and his main eyes were downcast. ‹I-I am glad. I know that you humans view your daemons as a very personal subject, and I would never want to say something inappropriate or offensive. Please, if I ever do something to upset you, tell me, and I will not do it again. I'm sorry. I'm just-› His voice got quicker as he spoke, until he stumbled over his words. And then he got sad. ‹I just…› He trailed off, and the telepathic silence weighed like steel in my mind, so heavy and solemn it was. ‹I will never understand what it means to have a daemon. I wish I could. I-this-›

And suddenly, to my shock, I realized that he was crying.

Tears were running down his face from his main eyes, his stalk eyes had frozen facing up towards the ceiling, and his breathing was quicker than normal.

I reached out, reflexively, because that was what you were supposed to do when someone was crying, wasn't it? But he pulled away, and I tried to ignore the little part of me that was glad.

He waved one hand infront of his stalk eyes, as though shooing away a fly, and shook his head rapidly. ‹No, please, I am sorry, I am being over-dramatic. It's just that I-I...I miss my family. I am sorry, I did not mean to steal the conversation, I'm sorry. I just...I wish that I had a daemon, so that I wouldn't feel so alone. I never...never felt alone before, there was always someone there, thoughts that weren't mine to fill the silence in between words. It just. It gets too quiet, here, and I…›

He drew his arms to his chest and hugged himself, shaking his head rapidly from side to side. ‹I'm sorry.› He said again, ‹I'm sorry. I just-it is just homesickness, that is all. I will-I will be fine. Please, I am rambling, and you were speaking. Please, continue. Do not let me…› He trailed off again, the silence filled with regret and embarrassment and sadness as he wiped his main eyes with the backs of his hands, looking anywhere but at me.

"Ax…" I said softly, clutching Tinyel even closer than before, "I didn't-I didn't realize…"

Why hadn't I noticed how upset he was?

Of course he was home-sick. Of course he was lonely. Of course he got sad whenever he saw us interacting with our daemons. I'd always just assumed that he was okay with not having one, that he was okay with being alone. He was, after all, an alien.

But that was the problem. He wasn't from Earth. He was from a planet that was constantly filled with telepathic noise. Background chatter and emotions and random pictures flitting through the air.

And now he was alone, in the silence of Earth, being reminded every single time he looked at us just how alone he really was.

I imagined what it would be like to lose Tinyel-to lose that spark of warmth and light and gentle song and laughter-and felt tears well up in my own eyes.

And of course, the crocodile chose that moment to surface in my mind, freezing me in place and sending dark grey-green scales rippling up my arms like goosebumps before the tears in my eyes even had a chance to fall.

Aximili noticed immediately, and froze, his eyes still red and his breathing hitching, his eyes wide.

The tears I'd shed slowly rolled down my face, and the crocodile simply sat there, its emotions locked away from my own, so that I couldn't tell what it was thinking.

Tinyel was still clutched to my chest, as frozen as I was.

For a few breathless moments, nobody moved.

And then, slowly, like pins and needles crawling up my arms, I felt control slip back into my hands. I twitched my fingers, then curled them into fists.

Tinyel jolted, and shook itself, quickly changing from the skunk form it had been resting in to a new shape, one I didn't recognize. It was about the same size and shape, but light tan with large white spots, and a long, skinny tail almost as long as its body.

I could only hope it was an actual animal species and not another thing we'd made up.

Despite my newfound control, the weight in my mind that was the crocodile remained exactly where it was, and the scales on my arms stayed put.

Suffice to say, our conversation was over.

Aximili dried his tears and evened his breathing, and I worked on doing the same, trying to reign in the panic that wanted to take over. My mind kept screaming at me, _not again, not again!_

I focused on my breathing, and tried to block out everything else. This was normal. This was supposed to happen. My body was just trying to adapt to the crocodile's DNA. This was supposed to happen. I wasn't morphing out of control again, so that was a good thing, right? That meant my body was adapting the DNA. I had chickenpox, so I wouldn't be able to get it again from other kids…

An entire minute passed in silence, in absolute stock-stillness. I counted the seconds down in my head.

And then another minute passed, and then a thought appeared in my mind, as though dropped from the sky.

 _-I am afraid-_

I _was_ afraid.

But that thought didn't belong to me.

Every muscle in my body that had started to relax froze all over again, but this time it was me doing the tensing, not the alien mind occupying my body.

It had just spoken to me.

The crocodile had just spoken to me.

It had just used words and _it had spoken to me_.

And then the mental barriers that had been around its mind collapsed, and I felt its fear as though it were my own, felt its confusion as though it were my own.

 _-I am afraid-_ it repeated, _-I am afraid I am afraid-_

It was using words. It was speaking to me. It was afraid.

This wasn't just DNA. I'd tried to make myself forget that I'd felt its mind in the hospital, and even in my room. I'd tried to convince myself that this would be easy, that it was just an animal, that all it cared about was eating and sleeping.

But I knew the difference between instincts and words. This was more than the crocodile simply being afraid. It was _telling_ me that it was afraid.

This wasn't my body adapting to the crocodile. This was the crocodile adapting to my body, to my brain, to my _intelligence_.

The revelation hit me like a bucket of cold water.

The crocodile was adapting to me, to my brain. To my very human, very sentient brain.

 _-I am afraid I am afraid I am afraid-_ it repeated the words like a mantra, but I could feel its mind focusing on mine, on my own torrent of thoughts and emotions at this revelation.

It latched onto a single thought, and repeated it back to me, desperate and terrified. _-let me go let me go-_

"I don't-I don't know how!" I didn't realize I'd spoken the words out loud until Aximili jumped, startled by the sound of my voice, reminding me that he was there. I turned to him, frantic, "Ax! It's-it's _talking_ to me! It's _scared_!"

Of me, I realized. It was scared of me. It was scared of the alien body it suddenly found itself trapped in, scared of Tinyel and the emotions flooding from its side of the bond, scared of my voice and my hands and my feet and my head and my eyes and everything that it could feel that wasn't what it should have been.

But mostly, it was afraid of me.

For the same reasons that I was afraid of it.

It saw me as an invader in its mind, an alien being that had stolen its mind out of its body and trapped it in a new form, something alien and strange and _wrong_.

It wanted to run away from me, but its feet had been replaced by my hands and feet. It wanted to bite me, but its razor filled maw had been replaced by my dull teeth and flat mouth. It wanted to hide beneath the water that was its home, but we were underground and sitting on a tattered old sofa that smelled too strongly of fabric freshener with clothes and bandages and a cast around my arm that held it in place and froze it in fear.

And all the while, it was sharing my mind, sharing my brain, learning and thinking in new ways that it hadn't been able to before, so that it could put words to the terror that had become its existence, so that it could think in exact detail about all of the things that were suddenly horribly wrong with the world.

 _-let me go-_ it repeated again, _-let me go please let me go please please-_ at the same time that Aximili demanded, ‹It is communicating with you? But that is not possible!›

"Well, obviously it is!" I snapped back, my fear and confusion making the words come out harsher than I intended.

I leapt to my feet, and almost came crashing back down as a sense of _wrongness_ swept over me. For a moment, standing on my own two legs, I felt what the crocodile was feeling. I was too tall, my legs were too long, I was up far too high. Where were my legs? Where was the ground and the water? Where was my tail?

The only reason I didn't go pitching forward at the sudden feeling of dizziness was because Tinyel leapt over my shoulder back onto the couch, turned into a dog, grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, and yanked me back down onto the cushions.

My chest flared in pain, and I spent a moment doing nothing but gasping for air, feeling like I'd been kicked in the stomach.

The crocodile had started to- -there wasn't any other word for it. It had started to cry. It was just this sound that filled my head, devoid of words but filled with emotion. Fear, anger, confusion, sadness.

And then the scales that were still on my arms rippled, and sank back into my skin, and with the terrible sound still echoing in my skull, the weight of the crocodile in my mind was lifted as quickly as it had appeared.

The whole thing had lasted maybe five minutes. But it felt like a lifetime, like an eternity. I lay where I had fallen, gasping for air, struggling to fit my new reality into place in the tapestry that was my existence.

The crocodile was adapting to my body. My brain. My intelligence. My _sentience_.

It had learned from me, from my thoughts even as they were happening, and it had _spoken_ to me. And not just in Andalite/Yeerk style thought-speak concepts and pictures. It had used _words_. It had spoken to me in _English_.

"Aximili," I managed to beg when I'd gotten my breathing back under control from the sheer panic, "Please tell me there is some way to get this crocodile out of my body."

I couldn't stand the thought of keeping it trapped for a single second longer than it had to be. That was what the Yeerks did to people. That was what our _enemy_ did. I couldn't become our enemy, I couldn't. I had to free the crocodile, and I had to do it soon.

 _-I will let you go, I promise._ \- I thought, concentrating all my willpower on the part of my mind where I'd felt the crocodile's weight settle, _-I didn't mean for this to happen, please forgive me. I will let you go. You're going to be okay.-_

I didn't get a response, but that was okay. I hadn't been expecting one, and if the crocodile couldn't hear me, that probably meant that it couldn't feel anything from me either, which was better than nothing. I'd rather it be sleeping than still trapped in my body like an unwilling host.

Unfortunately, Aximili didn't have any explanation for the sudden turn of events. As far as he was aware, no Andalites who'd developed an allergy to a morph had ever reported the morph learning from them before.

Whether it was simply a difference in brain structure, or something to do with the morphing technology, Aximili couldn't say, couldn't even really begin to guess at. It would be like asking a random kid off the street to teach you about the finer points of rocket science. He only knew what he'd been taught, and since humans were apparently the _first other species in the entire world_ to use the morphing technology, it was pretty much impossible to tell what had caused it or why.

But the facts were clear. The crocodile was as trapped as I was, and with every minute that passed, its mind was becoming less and less crocodile, and more and more human. It had started out as nothing more than the vicious, cold-blooded predator I had wrestled with at the Gardens. But every time after that, whenever it emerged, it started to change.

In my room, it had been confused, sure. But it also didn't really care all that much about the fact that it was suddenly somewhere new. As far as its memories told it, it had just had a snack taken away from it. And that made it angry.

Then, in the hospital, it had been even more confused, and that was when it started to feel fear.

And this time, it had truly known terror, and had gained the language to express that terror with.

I wasn't sure I wanted to know what would happen the next time it appeared.

But the facts were facts.

This was no longer just a simple allergy. This was a sentient being, trapped in my body.

It would have been funny, how quickly the tables had turned, if it weren't so serious, and if I couldn't still hear the sound of the crocodile crying in my mind.

I was remanded into Marco's care shortly after my attempted brainstorming session with Aximili failed miserably, and Aximili left to go on his morning run. It was the first time I'd actually realized what time it was. Barely half a day had passed since my house had collapsed in on me. The sun was just starting to rise for the new day.

Before he left, Aximili promised that he would give all his thoughts to the crocodile problem, which made me feel a little bit better.

I didn't forget the talk we still needed to have, though.

At some point that I wasn't aware of, Marco had been briefed. For some reason, he didn't make a big deal about the crocodile like I expected him to, but he didn't make any jokes about it, either. Which, to be honest, kind of creeped me out. If Marco wasn't joking, you knew things were bad.

But I was glad he seemed to be taking the situation seriously for once.

The rest of the day dragged on like sandpaper, with my 'guard' switching out every two hours.

Only Jake, Marco, and Aximili rotated through, leaving me wondering where Tobias was. Cassie, I knew, from what Aximili had said before, was off with Erek taking my place so that no one would notice I was gone. I could only assume he was somehow using his holograms to replicate my injuries on her, because otherwise everyone would be wondering how on Earth I had managed to heal so quickly.

Which brought up another question, or...more like an observation.

When the crocodile had started to morph me, when its scales had appeared on my arms, _both_ of my arms, it hadn't healed my injuries.

Not even the few cuts and bruises the scales had taken the place of had healed. As soon as the scales faded with the crocodile's mind, the cuts and bruises reappeared exactly as they had been.

Which shouldn't have been possible. But then again, this entire situation was completely unheard of, so it wasn't really like it was anything new. It sure seemed to interest Aximili though.

I kept up an almost constant stream of thought-speak conversation going in my head for the rest of the day, trying and hoping and praying that the crocodile would be able to hear me and know that we were doing everything we could to make sure that it was released safety.

There was one moment, where, for an instant, I felt my back start to itch, like my spine was trying to stretch, and felt the crocodile's mind settle in next to mine.

And then, before I could even manage to get a single word out, it was gone.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I knew what we needed to do.

I don't know what I was thinking, what trail of thought led me to the conclusion. It was like one second I was still reaching out, trying to connect with the crocodile's mind, and the next, I knew what to do.

Okay, so the problem was that the crocodile was trapped in my body, right? And if the rapidly shortening appearances were anything to go by, my body was slowly getting over its allergy, and pretty soon, the crocodile would be completely absorbed, just like a normal morph.

Which would mean that the crocodile would die.

So we had to figure out a way to get my body to stop adjusting.

Imagine it like this. You have the urge to sneeze-but your body just absolutely refuses to sneeze. So you're just stuck with this obnoxious tickling that won't go away.

How do you solve that problem? You give yourself a reason to sneeze. You stare at a bright light, or try to breathe in a certain way.

All I had to do was get my body to sneeze, and expel the crocodile DNA whether it _could_ adapt to it or not.

And I knew exactly how to make that happen.

All I had to do was go back to the Gardens, climb over the rail to the crocodile pit, and re-acquire my crocodile. And if that didn't do the trick, I would acquire the rest of the crocodiles in the enclosure. The sudden influx of reaction-inducing DNA would hopefully be enough to trigger a morph-sneeze.

It was a simple plan, when you thought about it.

The only problem was that it was ridiculously dangerous. The original crocodile I'd gotten the _new_ crocodile from in the first place didn't have my intelligence or compassion. It wouldn't have a single problem with snapping me up as a midnight snack. And neither would the rest of them.

There was also the itty bitty problem where I was still technically a prisoner. Or well, not _prisoner_ per se, but still. I couldn't leave until the others were absolutely 100% convinced that I wasn't infested, and they wouldn't let me leave even if I tried. They _couldn't_ let me leave. There was too much risk. They didn't _have_ to let me sit around and watch TV and play boardgames with them, but they were. It was a show of faith. They didn't _think_ I was infested, but they had to be _sure_. We couldn't take any chances.

...There was also the fact that the only reason I was still conscious was because someone had had the foresight to swipe pain medication from the hospital for me. Probably Marco, now that I thought of it.

But this was the only thing I could think of that would help the crocodile.

So I stopped staring at the TV, and focused instead on Marco-or rather, I focused on Macalia, since Marco had left the room to go to the bathroom.

She was currently draped across the back of the couch as an ocelot, which is a type of wild cat that is pretty much just a miniature leopard. She was grooming herself while she watched TV, licking her paw and wiping it over her face, but she snickered when she glanced over and caught me looking at her.

"See something you like?" She teased, sitting up a bit and baring her teeth in a grin that really wasn't meant for a cat's face. She ended up looking like the Cheshire cat, which, I guess was probably the whole point.

I wasn't in the mood for joking, though. "Macalia, this is serious." I said, turning fully to face her while Tinyel, in the form of a small blackbird, fluttered up and onto my shoulder, "I figured out how to get my body to reject the crocodile, but you aren't going to like it."

Heck, _I_ didn't like it. But it wasn't like I had much choice. If I didn't do something soon, the crocodile would die.

And there was no way I was going to let that happen.

Too many people had died in this war already. I wasn't going to add one more to the list.

Macalia covered her teeth again, rolled her eyes, and set her chin on her paws, staring at my forehead wearily. She was waiting for me to explain my plan. But why was she-

The realization, the theory, almost made me jump, almost distracted me. But I forged ahead, quickly, before I could spiral off into thoughts that wouldn't get me anywhere. "I have to go back to the crocodile pit, and morph the crocodile again. It'll be like breathing in dust after I've already got the urge to sneeze. It will work, I know it will."

That last part was a lie, but I was _pretty sure_ it would work. And that was better than nothing.

While I'd been speaking, Macalia's eyes had widened, and her ears had slowly flattened back towards her skull. Probably horrified by the idea, which I couldn't blame her for.

Then suddenly her ears shot forward, and her eyes narrowed. "No," She said, staring past my shoulder as though lost in thought, "No, you don't have to go all the way back to the Gardens. All you need is some of the crocodile's DNA. You don't need the whole crocodile. Just some of its DNA." She leapt to her feet, sinking her claws into the back of the couch to keep her balance, and turned to look over her shoulder towards the door. " _HEY MARCO!_ " She shouted, " _CALL JAKE! WE HAVE A PLAN!"_

* * *

Apparently, the mission went off without a hitch.

I wouldn't know, since I hadn't gone along.

It was a good thing I wasn't the one in charge of planning anything, because I'd forgotten one important thing:

I'd ripped the original crocodile open from elbow to hip. A deep and bloody gash across his pale belly, leaking blood and worse into the roiling water. I'd blocked the images from my memory, I'd completely forgotten that he'd had to be brought to the Gardens' emergency surgery center.

They managed to save him, managed to stitch him back together, but he was going to be heavily scarred, and it would be a while before he would be strong enough to be let back in with the rest of the crocodiles safely. In the meantime, he would recover in a smaller enclosure in the area of the park hidden from public view, where he would have peace and quiet instead of the roar of crowds and people shouting at him to move.

All Jake and Marco'd had to do was sneak into the employees-only area, find the enclosure the crocodile was in, and collect some blood from its bandages while the other acquired it to keep it calm.

Thank god, neither of them turned out to be allergic like I was. That would have majorly sucked.

If I'd been in charge of the mission, we'd have wasted so much time going to the normal enclosure and trying and failing to find it there. But that was why Jake was in charge, instead of me. He was actually good at planning things. And Marco of course always knew how to cut through all the clutter to get to the point as quickly as possible.

When they returned to Dig, they handed me an empty jelly jar that had been filled with cotton balls soaked a dark red.

From there, the rest was easy.

Theoretically, at least.

We shoved everything in the rec room to the walls, or carried it to the storage room if it was light enough. Well. I say 'we', but I really meant Jake, Marco, and Aximili. I still had messed up ribs and a broken arm to contend with, not to mention the fact that standing for more than five minutes straight was starting to make me want to pass out. None of us were exactly sure how _much_ pain medicine was _too_ much, so I hadn't taken any for the past few hours, and the effects were starting to show.

So I just sat against one of the dirt walls, holding my jar of crocodile blood, while the others cleared space in the middle of the room.

It was only after that was almost finished that I suddenly realized that the rec room, even being one of the larger rooms in the entire Dig, was still much smaller than my bedroom. Which...was a huge problem, when you considered the fact that the crocodile had been forcibly curled into an unnatural shape by the walls of my room because it was way too long to fit.

Any smaller, any sharper angle, and its neck probably would have been snapped by the speed it had been growing at.

If I tried to morph it in here, I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that it would be crushed to death. It would be like demorphing from ant to human inside a concrete block. No, not _like_ , it _was_ the exact same thing, the exact same concept. Demorph in too-small of a space, and you'd either suffocate or get flattened like a pancake.

I told the others that we needed more room. Jake sighed, Marco laughed, and Aximili just seemed annoyed that he hadn't noticed the problem to begin with.

I still wasn't sure where Tobias was. Maybe with Cassie and Erek? Stuck at the barn with Cassie's dad? That was probably the most likely reason...

Anyways, the Dig wasn't all that big, even if you knocked out all the walls and just left a huge, single room. Big enough for what we normally used it for, but the crocodile was longer than the entire thing by at least five feet.

Even _if_ we knocked down all the walls and managed to get everything out-which we were totally _not_ going to do, not after all the effort it had taken to make this place-there was no way the crocodile would fit. Let alone have any way of getting back out again.

I knew the others didn't like it, but we had to go above ground. It was the only place I could burp up the crocodile without killing it the moment it got bigger than ten feet long.

They took maybe a moment to think about it, but in the end, they agreed to bring me above ground, out to Aximili's scoop. Time was running out for the crocodile-if it wasn't already too late-and we all knew it.

So we went through Aximili's door, out to his scoop, and then to the large field beyond it.

It was dusk, with just a few remaining streaks of red along the horizon to show the direction of the sun. The stars had started to come out, leaving just enough light for us to see where we were going, but plunging the trees all around us into grayscale edging towards black.

A sudden burst of birds swarmed through the air high overhead, silently swooping and diving like a school of fish, headed home for the night. Crickets were starting to chirp in the distance, and a few owls called out to one another in the deepening darkness.

We were far into the woods, far from civilization and camping grounds. We would be safe here. The only prying eyes belonged to the owls and other nocturnal creatures.

No one had discussed-at least within earshot of me so far-what we were going to do with a twenty foot long, sentient crocodile once it was out of my body. I couldn't bring myself to worry about that. Once the crocodile was out of my body, once it was safe, we would figure something out. Maybe we could just release it back into the wild…

But even as the thought occurred to me, I knew it wouldn't be that simple.

It was sentient. It wasn't an animal, not any more. It was as much a person as I was. Forcing it to live in the wild would be as cruel as trying to force Tobias to live in the wild. Just because he didn't have a human body didn't mean he was an animal. And it was the same way for this crocodile. It had absorbed my intelligence, my sentience. It was as much a person as any of us.

And time was running out, and it was afraid.

As soon as we were in the middle of the clearing, Tinyel disappeared into my shadow without a single moment of hesitation. It would be best for both of us if it was only me having to deal with this.

And for once, I couldn't be bothered to care what everyone else thought. At least it was dark enough that they probably couldn't see any of the details.

Taking one last deep breath for courage, I unscrewed the lid from the jar, wedged it in the crook of my cast, stuck my good hand in until my fingers brushed quickly-drying wetness, and began to acquire the crocodile for the second time in a row.

The reaction was immediate. Heat washed over my skin, and nausea suddenly churned in my stomach, just like the first time.

And then it got worse.

Aximili darted in with perfect timing to grab the jar from my suddenly slack hands, and then leapt back to safety not a moment too soon, moving as though he weighed less than air.

One second, I was on my feet.

And the next, my legs had crumpled out from under me and I was flat on the ground, my ribs and arm and wrist screaming at me at the top of their lungs. It felt like I'd had a car dropped on top of me. Something was weighing down all of my limbs so that I didn't even have a chance at lifting them. It was like the sky had suddenly fallen down, and even though I liked to think of myself as strong, I was no Atlas.

It was exactly like being crushed under the wreckage of my bedroom, minus only the dust and debris.

I screamed.

I'm not proud to admit it, but I did. I screamed in terror, and tried and failed to fight my way out from under the weight that was crushing me. I managed to get my good arm free, and tried to claw at the ground to pull myself out from under the weight, all logical thought thrown out the window in the face of the horror that had come back to bite me again. I fought with animal terror to get out from under what was crushing me.

And then suddenly I wasn't alone in my head anymore, because the crocodile was there too, a mental weight that just made the whole thing even worse than it already was. My thoughts felt like they had been crushed, and it was difficult to think, difficult to form coherent thoughts and words.

My scream died in my throat, my mind too jumbled and confused to even do that much, and the crocodile spoke.

 _-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I don't mean to scare you, it's okay, it's going to be okay.-_

I felt the weight crushing me to the ground shift, moving to the side. And that was when my terror abated just enough for me to actually remember what was happening and why.

It also gave me back enough focus to feel what was happening to my body besides the crushing weight pinning me down.

The crocodile was emerging from my back, from my spine. I could feel the grinding of forming bones, and the squishing, sliding sensation of guts forming from nothing. But this wasn't a normal morph, this wasn't my body that was doing the changing. It was the crocodile's. It was crawling out of my body, even as it formed.

Claws slashed at my shoulder, and I didn't even have enough strength to flinch.

 _-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that! I'm trying to get off of you, I'm sorry!-_ came the crocodile's voice in my head, more intelligent than any sentence I could form at that moment.

I tasted acid in my throat, and fought down the urge to throw up. I was face down in the dirt. Throwing up now would be more disgusting than I could handle. But it felt like my guts were being pulled out of my back, and it was not a pleasant sensation _or_ mental image.

Some of the weight eased off my shoulders, and I struggled to push myself up on my elbows, refusing to stay flat on the ground for one second longer. I almost leapt out of my skin when I turned to look over my shoulder only to come face to face with dark green pebbled lips, and teeth as large as my fingers.

Hot breath rolled across my face, surprisingly scentless, and the crocodile swung its massive head to the side, aiming its teeth away from me, and bringing one of its large eyes over to stare directly into mine.

It was green, speckled here and there with darker flecks, and a pupil slitted like a cat's. Even as I watched, the pupil widened until all that was left of the green was a thin ribbon around the edge as the crocodile's eyes adjusted to the darkness still falling over us.

We stared at each other for what might have been a moment, or might have been an eternity.

Something passed between our minds that was more than words. I don't even know how to describe it, or what it meant. But suddenly, I felt...something, some piece of me, pull away. It looked at the crocodile, and some part of the crocodile looked back. It was beyond conscious thought or language or even instinct. It was something greater than the two of us, as though some part of nature itself was looking between the two of us and deciding something.

Neither of us said anything. It felt like it would be blasphemous to speak right then.

Then I felt one of its legs emerge from mine, and the spell was broken.

Morphing never happens the same way twice. It's always unpredictable. So every time it happens, your brain pays super close attention to all the details, which makes it seem like it's taking longer than it actually is. Like how after you've already watched a movie four different times, it seems shorter than the first time you watched it. Or how the drive home seems shorter than when you were leaving. Your brain already knows what's going to happen, so it glosses over the details it was obsessing over the first time.

Though it felt like an eternity since I'd acquired the crocodile again from its blood, barely sixty seconds had passed.

Its head had fully formed, as had its two front legs and feet, and one of its back feet. Its belly was draped heavily across my back, and though it was trying its best to get off of me entirely, that plan was made difficult by the fact that half its spine was still fused with mine.

It planted its front feet firmly into the dirt next to my shoulders, and tried to wiggle its one stubby back foot towards the ground so that it could at least stand up and take some of its weight off me.

But it was still growing. Soon its head alone would be almost as big as my entire body.

How had I ever managed to acquire the original without getting killed?

I closed my eyes, let my arms drop me back into the dirt, and prayed the morph would complete before I was crushed to death.

It felt like forever, as my brain kept track of every bone grinding into place, every slosh of intestines forming and squirming, every prickle of scales and every inch of muscle that made up the crocodile fought its way into existence from the DNA stored in my blood.

And the whole time, I felt the crocodile's mind pulling away from mine, bit by bit, until my head felt so light I almost thought it would go floating off my shoulders. It was weird how quickly I'd gotten used to its weight in my thoughts. Like a river flowing around a rock, and then suddenly the rock wasn't there any more.

I kept my eyes closed and just tried to relax against the ground, my face buried in my hands in an attempt to block out the sensations of morphing. It would be over soon. And all of the crocodile's feet had formed, so the only weight left on my back was its tail, which was still forming out of the middle of my spine like the creepiest umbilical cord ever.

Tinyel pulled out of my shadow and appeared in front of my face, and I felt its whiskers tickle my chin as soft fur curled up next to my shoulder, tiny claws pricking my skin when they clung to the tattered remains of my shirt.

The morphing outfit that had been lost in the destruction of my house was the only one I'd had. The only one I'd ever needed.

 _Look on the bright side_. I thought to myself, feeling Tinyel beginning to purr, even though it was in a shape far too small to be any type of cat, _that means I have an excuse to go shopping_ …

Maybe I could even do something with Marco's constant-if joking-complaint that none of our morphing outfits matched.

It wasn't that bad of an idea, actually. At least then we'd have _some_ semblance of normalcy if we ever got caught in them in public. We could pretend to be street performers or something.

I got so caught up in planning out the outfits and Tinyel's purring form nestled against my neck that it took me a few seconds to realize that there was no longer any weight on my back, and that the entire clearing had fallen silent.

Before, there had been all the sounds of the morph, plus Marco's low murmuring to Jake that had been too faint for me to make out past the sound of my bones grinding into new shapes and detaching themselves from the rest of my body.

But now the morph was complete, and Marco had fallen silent.

Even the crickets had stopped chirping, and for a second, I could have sworn that even the wind had stopped ghosting through the trees.

I pulled my hands away from my face and slowly pushed myself to my knees, shaking a bit from exhaustion and the creeping chill that was slowly crawling up my skin. Tinyel transformed into a sloth a few moments before I was fully upright, and draped itself from my neck, shielding my chest from view before I even remembered that that was going to be a problem.

I felt so tired all of a sudden that it was hard to stay upright. Tinyel had made itself as light as a feather, but I still had to fight to stay sitting up instead of toppling back over onto the ground.

I braced my hands against the ground and peered around the darkness that had finally fallen completely over the forest, trying to spot the crocodile and figure out why everyone had suddenly gone silent.

A small part of me worried that the crocodile had gone feral, but the rest of my mind shrugged the thought off without a second of hesitation. I just _knew_ that that wasn't the case. The crocodile wasn't a normal animal, it was a morph. We always had our human consciousnesses available, no matter what morph we were in. Being separated from me wouldn't suddenly turn the crocodile back into a wild animal. It still had access to my sentience, and it had all of its new memories.

So why was everyone quiet? I'd have expected Marco to be making jokes, or Aximili to be talking rapid-fire about how this was a scientific breakthrough, or Jake to be making plans.

But instead there was silence.

I could still see the others, standing a dozen or so feet away. I could see Aximili, his normally bright fur reduced to a shadowed grey in the darkness. His eyestalks were waving. I could see Macalia sitting next to him, her eyes glinting in the dim lighting, as some sort of cat. Her tail was twitching. I could see Marco, next to her, one hand held up to his mouth, one foot behind him as though he'd frozen in the middle of stepping backwards. I could see his shoulders move as he breathed. Then there was Jake, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open, Funera as a snake curling around his neck. He was blinking, as though he couldn't believe what he was seeing, and Funera was slowly crawling to the top of his head so that she could peer infront of him with the same amount of confusion and awe.

They were moving, they were breathing. This was no Ellimist trick, as Tinyel silently warned me that it might be, but they were silent, staring at something to my side.

And then I noticed the glint of moisture in Aximili's eyes.

I was too tired to move quickly, but I turned my head to look at what they were all staring at, and my eyes found the large, dark shape on the ground that I knew, instinctively, was the crocodile.

It wasn't moving.

Its scales were too dark against the ground for me to tell if it was breathing.

Horror sparked in my chest, and I fought the exhaustion weighing my limbs down to get to my feet, and when that failed, I lunged across the ground on hands and knees, panic swelling in my chest and forming a lump in my throat that made it hard to breathe.

No. No, it couldn't be dead. Not after all of this. Not after all of this.

I tried to reach out with my mind, tried to call out to it like I had before, but I hit a mental roadblock, and my attempted thought-speak went nowhere, like water tumbling off a cliff.

I wasn't in morph, and the crocodile's mind was no longer connected to my mind. I couldn't use thought-speak while in my human body.

"Cr-crocodile?" My voice came out shaky, shattering the silence that had fallen over the clearing. Why was it so quiet? Why wasn't Marco making jokes? Why was Aximili crying? My fingers found its scaly hide, and I dragged myself closer, fingers desperately searching for something, anything that would tell me if the crocodile was still alive. The scales were cold, but crocodiles were cold-blooded, so that didn't mean anything. That didn't mean it was dead.

The scales beneath my hand shifted, and I almost began to cry in relief. I pulled myself closer, and suddenly I could see the ground on the other side of the crocodile, and I could see why everyone had fallen silent. I could see why Marco wasn't joking, I could see why Aximili had tears in his eyes, I could see why Jake was dumbstruck and gaping.

I had to lean over the crocodile's back to get a clear look, and Tinyel changed back into whatever small shape it had been in before it had turned into a sloth, and clung to my shoulder to avoid touching the crocodile.

It took a moment to realize what I was seeing, but when I did, my breath caught in my throat and decided it was going to stay there for a while.

Because, right next to the crocodile's side, which I could now see moving gently in and out as it breathed, was a shape. It was small, barely bigger than a house cat, and tiny compared to the twenty foot crocodile it was next to.

But it was bright, even in the night, as though lit up from within with millions of golden lights. For a few seconds, I couldn't figure out what it was, its shape was too hard to define. Was it a ball of air, or was that fur? Was that a tree branch or a rock? No, no, those were definitely feathers, barred white and black. It kept shifting, changing like molten lava, in and out of different shapes so quickly that it was almost impossible to keep track of them, like-

Like….

And then I knew.

I knew as surely as I knew that Tinyel was mine.

This was a daemon that we were all staring at. This was a daemon that was being born. This was a daemon that didn't belong to any human, or even Andalite.

This was a daemon.

And it belonged to the crocodile.

And even as I watched, the crocodile moved its head closer to its daemon, its daemon that was still shifting from shape to shape faster than the eye could see, until its mouth brushed against the feathers that were there one moment and gone the next.

The crocodile opened its mouth, and before anyone could react, grabbed its daemon in its teeth, flicked its head, and tossed it into its mouth.

I felt a moment of shock, a moment of unbound horror. But then I had a sudden flash of one of the workers at the Gardens telling us about crocodiles, about how they carried their young in their mouths.

The breath I'd been holding whooshed out, and I sagged in relief, not even caring that I was draped across the crocodile's back. It was payback from before. We were even now. From my vantage point, I could see that the crocodile's mouth was held only partially shut, and I could see the faint glow of its daemon shining from the cracks between its teeth.

It was just protecting it, the same way it would if it were its baby. Crocodiles had some of the strongest jaws on the entire planet. There was nowhere safer.

Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only one that knew this little tidbit of information.

I can't even describe the sound that Ax made when he saw the crocodile supposedly eat its own daemon. It went beyond a scream, and straight to pure, unadulterated horror that filled the heads of probably every living being within twenty feet of us. It seared through my brain, just the way Elfangor's last scream had.

I flinched, and Tinyel transformed disappeared from around my neck and turned into a wolf as black as the night, its mouth a snarl shaped with teeth so white that they seemed to float in the darkness, unattached to anything else.

It only took a moment for my daemon to calm back down, for me to remember that we were in the forest instead of the construction site, but Aximili had reared up on his hind legs like a frightened horse, and looked ready to bolt. His telepathic scream had died off, but now he was shouting into the night, dancing away from the crocodile and I on skittish, terrified feet. ‹ _What kind of planet is this?_ ›He cried, still dancing away, his tail blade flashing as though he were considering using it, ‹ _What kind of creature could_ _do_ _something like that?!_ ›

Marco looked like he was going to puke, and Jake's face had completely drained of blood.

I wanted to tell them that it was okay, that it _wasn't what they thought_ , but I was so tired, I could barely even keep my eyes open.

Tinyel was still a wolf, but it had stopped snarling, and now in the darkness it was all but invisible in its black fur. I tugged on the invisible string between us, feeling the exhaustion in my bones starting to really pull me down.

Tinyel didn't like talking, but I couldn't even if I wanted to. Someone had to explain what the crocodile was doing before someone got hurt, or scarred for life.

I let myself relax against the crocodile, figuring it wouldn't mind. Or, if it did mind, it could easily shrug me off.

I closed my eyes, and as the fog of sleep rolled over my mind, I heard Tinyel's voice, saying, "Guys, it's okay. Crocodiles carry their babies in their mouths. She's just protecting her…"

And then the darkness swept over me, and I knew no more.

* * *

The cold was gone, and had been replaced with dull warmth.

There were blankets piled ontop of me, thin, but comfortably soft. I felt a pillow under my head. And I felt Tinyel lying on my chest, light as a feather, purring loudly, claws kneading gently.

I knew, without even having to open my eyes, that I was back in my hospital room. I wondered how long Tinyel had been awake after I'd lost consciousness.

I sighed internally.

Just another-

 _ **No.**_

The thought that had been about to form stuttered and failed before it could even be finished.

It wasn't a word, it was just such a forceful combination of emotions that they could only add up to that one word. It was like a rock being dropped into a still pond. A twig snapping in a silent forest.

It came from Tinyel's side of our bond.

I lay still, keeping my eyes closed, frozen like a deer in the headlights. My daemon had never spoken to me in such a way before. Never with this level of…

…I wasn't sure what to call it.

Anger wasn't quite right, but it was the closest approximation I could come up with.

The purring had stopped, and its paws had fallen still. I could feel its gaze locked onto me, and I slowly, hesitantly opened my eyes to meet it.

It lay on my chest as a black cat whose coat was speckled with dull grey spots that looked like stars. Its face was lighter, but smudged with more grey, almost as though it had rolled around in soot.

And folded across its back were silky black wings, speckled with more dusty stars.

I wanted to open my mouth, wanted to glance fearfully at the door, wanted to throw the blanket over my daemon to hide it from anyone that came in-

But it eyes, the brightest amber, held mine, and didn't let me look away, or even blink.

And then my daemon opened its mouth, and it spoke.

"No." It said simply. It's voice was a weight holding me in place. Its voice was flat and serious, more serious than I had ever heard it be before. "I am done hiding. I am done hiding my gender, I am done hiding my forms, I am done hiding my pain, and I am done hiding my fear. I am what I am. You are what you are. We can't keep hating ourselves for _being_ ourselves. It stops, right here, right now."

I wanted to argue, wanted to cover my ears. Because what would the others think if they knew? But Tinyel still held my gaze, its eyes slowly turning more and more towards gold as I watched.

It didn't need to speak more to tell me that it was done talking, that I would have to figure the rest out for myself.

I took a deep breath to steady myself, and clenched my hands until my fingernails bit into my palms to stop myself from getting to my feet to lock the door. I knew that my daemon would refuse to move if I even tried. And worse, it would probably make itself weigh more so that I couldn't move at all.

I had no choice but to lie there and think about the question I'd asked myself. The question whose answer my daemon demanded.

What would the others think, if they knew?

They already thought I was some bloodthirsty-warrior. They already thought that I enjoyed fighting for the sake of fighting. Violence for the sake of violence, blood for the sake of blood.

And I realized, right then lying in my hospital bed, staring into my daemon's eyes, that _I'd_ almost forgotten the reason I was fighting.

It made a chill run up my spine, the sudden knowledge of just how much control over my own identity had been stolen from me.

I'd let myself be convinced, by Marco's jokes, by Jake's orders, by Cassie's judgement, by Aximili's admiration, even by Tobias' willingness to share his experience as a hawk with me, that I was fighting because it was something I _enjoyed_.

Every mission we went on, they just drove it in further. So slowly I hadn't even noticed, so slowly that there wasn't anything I could do to stop it.

Marco likes to call me Xena, warrior princess. She-who-fears-nothing. He always joked that I was fearless, that I was insane, that my insanity might rub off on them if they weren't careful.

Cassie always side-eyed me when she was giving a speech about our mission. As though I, in particular, needed reminding that we were supposed to be the good guys, and, as good guys, had to follow certain moral guidelines. As though I were completely without conscience, without compunctions.

And Jake...he'd been just as reckless as I was, not so long ago. Just as ready to charge into battle, just as ready to make the enemy feel some pain. So when had he started looking at me like I was a monster waiting to strike out? Why did he always order me to do the dirty work, and then look at me afterwards as though I'd come up with the idea myself?

Tobias didn't talk about what it was like being a hawk to any of the others. It was only me he talked to about the horrors of eating live mice, only me he talked to about those few days where he had gone feral and lived completely as a hawk. It was only me he talked to about the way he _enjoyed_ killing, the way the thrill of a successful hunt was one of the best feelings in the world.

Aximili was almost the worst. Because he didn't judge me like it was a bad thing. It was the exact opposite-he thought I was one of the greatest warriors he had ever met. Fearless in battle and always eager for a mission. He admired my bloodlust.

It had all been so clear when we first joined this war. It was so clear. I knew why I was fighting, I knew what my goals were. I was fighting for my family, for my friends, for my teachers and peers and random strangers on the street and people halfway around the world that I wouldn't ever even meet. I was fighting to protect them, to protect their freedom. I was fighting because Melissa lived her life knowing that her parents didn't love her anymore, and not knowing why. I was fighting so that someday, Mr. and Mrs. Chapman could be parents again, could let their daughter know that they loved her, so that they could all begin to heal the wounds the Yeerks had dealt them. I was fighting so that my cousin would someday be free, and so that my sisters would never have to go through the same horrors. I was fighting so that my parents wouldn't have to lose any of their children without ever even realizing it.

I fought, so that others would be safe from Yeerk control. I fought, so that others wouldn't have to.

I would walk through fire if it meant that I could rescue someone on the other side. I would swim through blood if it meant I could carry someone to safety. I would risk myself as many times as needed if it meant that I could spare others pain. I had the power to stop this war, and I was going to use that power to its fullest extent. Anything less would be a crime against humanity itself.

I was fighting because the only other alternative was the enslavement of the entire human race.

I was fighting because I had to, because if I didn't, who else would? Who else _could_?

I was fighting because I wanted to save people.

I was fighting because I wanted this war to be over.

But somehow, I'd forgotten that.

Somehow, I'd forgotten the very reason why I was fighting.

I let everyone else tell me why I was doing what I did. I let Marco tell me that I was fearless and insane, I'd let Cassie tell me that I was without morals, I'd let Jake tell me that I was the most expendable person in the group, I'd let Tobias tell me that I was the only other person who could understand what it was like to enjoy killing, I'd let Aximili tell me that I fought, not to protect people, but to bring myself personal honor.

I'd let them convince me that I was Xena, warrior princess. Only, I was the Xena set before the show, not the hero I'd always looked up to and admired. I was the Xena who raided camps and stole and killed without mercy, who razed villages to the ground and never looked back, who fought and killed and laughed it all off like it was no big deal, like it was _fun_.

But that wasn't who I was. I wasn't fighting because I liked the feel of blood on my hands or in my mouth or under my feet.

I wasn't fighting because I wanted to hurt the Yeerks.

I was fighting because I wanted to make the Earth safe, for everyone that was on it, and everyone that ever would be.

And somehow my friends had made me forget that.

They convinced me that I was in the wrong, that my reasons for fighting were something to be ashamed of, something to hide.

So what would they think, if they knew that Tinyel enjoyed wearing unusual forms, and was neither he nor she? If they knew that my daemon was sometimes awake while I was asleep, and the other way around?

What would they think, if they knew that I was completely repulsed by the idea of romance? If they knew that the thought of kissing disgusted me, and I didn't understand the appeal of dating at all?

What would they think if I finally stood up for myself, and sent the pedestal they'd put me up on crashing to the ground?

What would they think, if I told them about the conversation I'd had with my mom?

I knew what they would think if they knew that Tinyel didn't always take on normal forms. They'd think I was crazy. That this war was changing me faster than it was changing them, and I would become an example of something to be avoided at all costs. They didn't want to be like me.

I knew what they would think if they found out that Tinyel was an it. They would think that there had always been something wrong with me.

If they found out that I was repulsed by the thought of dating, they would think I was a heartless, cold monster. Marco would probably call me frigid. An ice queen. A black widow. Or worse, a sociopath. A freak. An inhuman monster.

And if I told them about the conversation I'd had with my mom, they wouldn't believe it. I wasn't like the people they saw in movies. I wasn't like the kids who rode the short bus to school. I could look people in the eye, I could speak without stuttering, I acted like a normal kid.

But they only saw the surface. They only _wanted_ to see the surface.

They'd reduced me to a shadow of who I was.

But what they thought of me didn't _define_ me. No matter what they thought or said, I knew why I was fighting.

And the fact that I'd almost forgotten those reasons didn't make them disappear. It was one of the laws of the universe. Just because you didn't acknowledge it didn't make it not real. You could tell yourself that gravity wasn't real all you liked, but that didn't mean you went floating off into space.

My reasons for fighting didn't suddenly change just because I forgot what they were.

So what _would_ they think, if they knew that I was different from them, in ways they couldn't imagine?

I looked into my daemon's eyes, which had faded slowly from gold, to white, and finally to black, and I knew the answer.

It didn't matter.

It didn't matter, because it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't change _me_.

Because I didn't need to change. There was nothing wrong with me, no matter what my friends tried to convince me.

There was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with Tinyel.

The only thing wrong was that I had ever thought there was in the first place.

It didn't matter what my friends thought of me. It would never- _could_ never-change the facts.

And the facts were simple.

I could see that now. I could see it as clearly as I had that day so long ago coming in from the snow. It was natural. It was _me_.

I'd once been unapologetic and unworried about the facts of my life.

I could do that again. I could _be_ that again.

Only this time, I would make sure to explain myself a little better, so that people really understood. There would be no repeats of my mother's mad dash through the snow.

Tinyel took up its purring again, and I knew that it felt my resolve.

I was going to call a meeting of the Animorphs the first chance I got, and we were going to sit down, and have a long, serious talk.

I was done hiding who and what I was. And I was done letting others pick and choose labels for me.

* * *

Two months, at least, until my broken bones healed themselves. And at least a week or two after that before I would be allowed to go on another mission, just to be sure I was back to my full strength.

That was the first thing Jake announced a week later when we all met up in my hotel room for the meeting I had called. My dad was still insisting on paying for rooms for the whole family. Mom and Sara and Jordan were all sharing a room, but it had been decided that since I was old enough, I could handle a room just to myself.

At least, that was the official story. The unofficial version probably had something to do with the fact that my parents could tell they'd driven me almost insane with their constant worrying over me while I was still in the hospital. Barely an hour had passed when one of them wasn't in the room, and they had to pretty much be kicked out at the end of the night.

I knew they were just worried about me, I knew they were just trying to assure themselves that I really was okay, but still. I could only handle so much attention before I wanted to start setting things on fire just to get away and have some time to recuperate. Didn't they understand that it took _energy_ being around people all day? Especially people who insisted on talking to me every second that they were in the room, asking if I needed something to drink, if I liked the cafeteria's food, if I wanted them to order a pizza, what had been happening at school recently…

It was all just way too much.

And they knew that, which was why they'd given me my own hotel room. I wasn't going to lie, it was a _very_ welcome reprieve.

There was one other thing to be glad of, though. My hotel room was on the ground floor, something I hadn't even thought of until it was pointed out to me by my mom. She and my dad had worried that I wouldn't be comfortable being up on a higher floor.

I was glad they'd thought of that scenario, because it hadn't even crossed my mind. But I knew that if I'd had to take a flight of stairs or an elevator to get to my room, it wouldn't have been fun at all. And by that, I mean I probably would have slept at the bottom of the stairs rather than climb them. There were just some things your brain wouldn't let you do, no matter how many times you tried to convince yourself that you were being ridiculous. And going up several flights of stairs after I'd fallen through my bedroom floor and been seriously injured? Wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Brains didn't care about things like _embarrassment_ or pride. Brains cared about staying alive. And now my brain associated stairs and high floors with almost dying. And it wasn't going to let go of that association easily, and definitely not within a single measly weak.

So there we were, us Animorphs. Marco was lounging across the foot of the bed paint-me-like-one-of-your-french-girls style, with Macalia draped across his shoulders as an albino ferret with bright red eyes. She was very obviously mimicking Tinyel in an attempt to get Tinyel to mimic _her_ , but we knew this game, and we weren't going to play it today. Maybe later, but not now.

Cassie was sitting in the arm chair by the wall with her knees pulled up to her chest, Alexander perched on the back of the chair as a squirrel, and both of them looking extremely uncomfortable in the fancy hotel room.

Jake was standing next to her chair, Funera, as almost always, a tiger at his feet. He'd made no move to sit since he entered the room, and had his arms crossed over his chest, his expression unreadable, as though he were preparing himself mentally.

Aximili was sitting on the floor in his unnervingly pretty human morph, very carefully and very _slowly_ eating the bag of pretzels I'd gotten for him. He needed practice eating in human morph without getting overwhelmed, and I figured pretzels were a safe bet to start out with. They had flavor, but it wasn't intense enough to drive him over the edge. Like certain other foods whose names were not to be mentioned within his earshot. Certain foods that started with a C and ended with an S. Certain foods that he was not to be exposed to in public _ever_.

And last but not least, Tobias was sitting on his usual perch. It was maybe four feet tall, and could fold up on itself and back into its traveling case, which doubled as a stand when it was on the floor. We'd learned early on that hawk talons, plus wooden furniture, was a very bad combination. Especially when your parents would freak out and want to know what you'd done to destroyed great-grandma's antique dresser.

It wasn't exactly feasible-or comfortable-for one of us to always be holding him either. His talons could scratch wood easily, but they were _made_ to tear flesh. Sitting on one of our shoulders or hands was impossible unless we were wearing a thick coat or a leather glove. Otherwise, blood would be drawn, and lots of it. He had to grip tight to keep his balance.

And trust me. You don't want talons made for slicing through mice grabbing onto your arm.

And sitting on the floor made it pretty much impossible for him to get airborne again without having to be picked up and thrown. Eventually Cassie had just gotten sick of the frustration, and bought the perch for him from the pet store.

He'd been snippy about using it at first, declaring that he was a _hawk_ , not some pathetic little pet. To which Cassie gave him a silent, flat, and unrelenting stare for an entire minute straight while the rest of us watched in awed silence, until he finally just shuffled his wings in resignation and quietly stepped off her gloved hand and up onto the perch.

But he made sure to make sarcastic, grumbled comments about it every now and then, just to make sure we all knew how unhappy he was. His perch was close to the curtained window, so that he wouldn't have to go far to get back outside once the meeting was over.

And speaking of mice. Venitas was sitting on the floor below the perch, looking anywhere but up at Tobias.

I wondered what it would be like to live with a daemon that hated you. Or, more specifically, I wondered what it would be like going through life hating your daemon. I felt sorry for Venitas, but there wasn't really anything I could do to help her. Tobias needed to heal himself. No one else could do it for him. I'd sure as heck tried. But he always pushed me away.

He only came to talk to me so that he could tell me how horrible his life was, but he refused to ever do anything to make it better.

I'd had to give up on trying to help him. There wasn't anything I could do if he refused to take the first step.

He'd made his bed, and now he would have to lie on it.

Or maybe I should say perch on it.

It wasn't any secret that he'd purposefully trapped himself in morph. He tried to make excuses, tried to convince us that he just hadn't been able to find anywhere to demorph. But we all knew the truth. He'd been in morph before that mission even began. For all we knew, he'd _already_ gone over the limit. But even if he hadn't, even if he'd run out of time down in the Yeerk pool, that place was the size of the city. It was dimly lit, with rocky outcroppings and empty buildings and storage sheds and stairs and heavy equipment and darkened areas that were still under construction. Human eyes were weak in the darkness. Hork-Bajir eyes were even _worse_.

There were enough hiding spots for me to morph to elephant. Enough hiding spots for Marco to morph to gorilla. Enough hiding spots for Jake to morph to tiger.

One small bird could find a million spots to hide. One human boy wouldn't be out of place among the thousands of controllers and slaves down there for the minute he would have had to be in his real body.

Out of all of us, he should have had the easiest time demorphing and re-morphing.

But he'd made his choice. Long before he even went down there.

And now, he always made self-deprecating remarks about how useless he was, since he couldn't help us on most of the missions. He always called himself stupid and useless and a burden. He always belittled himself and complained for us supposedly on our behalf. He wanted us to reassure him that it wasn't his fault that he couldn't help us on missions, he wanted us to reassure him that he was doing everything he could, that he'd lost more to this war than we had. That it was okay for him to spend all of his time flying around as his favorite animal while we risked our lives and sanity fighting in the war he'd abandoned us to.

It was really hard not to resent him. He'd been the one urging us all to join this war, he'd been the one telling us that we needed to give up our childhoods to become warriors.

And then, before we even went on our first mission, he chickened out. Not just out of the war, but out of _life_. He'd been the one telling us all from the very beginning that we _had_ to do this, and then he went, and he abandoned us. He brought our number down from five to four. Because he couldn't join us on missions, because he couldn't morph with the rest of us, and he couldn't fly over water, or inside buildings, or at night, or during rain, or anywhere that a hawk would be out of place, like in the city, or at the beach, or anywhere that wasn't Cassie' house and the national park that bordered it.

It was really hard not to resent him.

Really, really hard.

And every time he made a joke about how useless he was, just so that one of us would be forced to tell him it wasn't true, even though _we_ were the ones that were getting our hands dirty and _we_ were the ones that had to lie awake at night watching our thoughts spin in violent, blood-soaked circles and _we_ were the ones actually fighting in this war while he got to stay home and fly around all day...

It got a little bit harder.

With every mission, with every remark, with every complaint he made about having to sit on a perch made for pet birds….

It got a little bit harder not to resent him.

It was like a frozen lake, or a windshield. And there was a crack in the center, and you could just see it slowly branching out farther and farther, spreading like lightning.

Someday, the ice, the glass, it would shatter. Someday, it would just be too much. Someday, Tobias would complain about his decision not to help us fight for our planet, and the wall inside my head would break, and something would pour out. And nothing would be able to build that dam back up again. You couldn't un-break glass.

I try my best to ignore him, when he starts talking like that. But he _wants_ to be heard. He _wants_ to be acknowledged. Sometimes he even speaks directly to me so that no one else can hear. Just so that he can demand my attention, and I have no choice but to respond.

And that crack in the ice grows a little bit more.

It just...it gets to me, how completely selfish he was. He demanded that the rest of us fight in this war and then he just…threw it all away, and shoved all the responsibility onto us. And he still expects us to tell him he's wrong when he calls himself selfish and stupid...He expects us to forgive him for the choice he made, even though it affects us every single day, with every single mission that we go on that would be so much easier with just _one more person_.

If it were anyone else, any _thing_ else, Marco would have called him out on it months ago. But he didn't, and neither did any of us. Because even though we all knew how badly Tobias had screwed us all over, we aren't allowed to say those words out loud. Because even if it was his decision, Tobias was still suffering. He was still trapped, even if he'd locked the cage door himself.

And that should have been punishment enough.

It should have been.

But some days...

Some days it just didn't feel like it. It didn't feel like it was enough.

Sometimes I wonder if we would have been friends, Tobias and I, if we'd never met Elfangor. If I'd only met him through Jake, if we'd started talking on that walk home from the mall.

But I get my answer anew, every time we go on a mission and he stays behind. I get my answer anew, every time he makes a scathing remark to Venitas. I get my answer anew, every time I remember that there should be six of us going on missions to save our entire planet instead of five.

I'd tried in the beginning, in those first few months. I felt sorry for him. But I knew now that I could never be Tobias' friend, not while he was still so cruel to his own daemon, not while he was still so singularly _selfish_.

I've never said the words out loud, but that's what he was. Selfish. He could have demorphed down in the Yeerk Pool. He could have waited until the mission began to morph in the first place. He could have demorphed when Jake told him to. He could have demorphed on the way down the endless stairs. He could have hidden at any time and reset his timer. He had so many chances, so many chances to change his decision. And he threw every single one of them out the window, and us under the bus. We went from having five soldiers to four, and our chances of winning went down.

He made his choice. And all of us had to live with it.

So I was sitting on top of the dresser in my hotel room, facing the rest of the room and looking anywhere but at Tobias, and Tinyel was draped across my shoulders as some half-crow, half-ferret _thing_. I don't know if the crow part was out of spite to Tobias, but I half hope it was. There are two animals Tobias makes no effort to hide his loathing for. Golden eagles, and crows.

Golden eagles, because they would sometimes prey on unwary red-tails, and crows, because they just _adored_ 'mobbing' him every chance they got. Mobbing is when a group of birds harass and tease another. If you've ever looked up at the sky and seen a hawk or falcon surrounded by a flock of crows, that's what's going on. Falcons and hawks sometimes eat crow chicks, so the adults take it upon themselves to drive them away any chance they get. And, if the any of the stories Tobias has told are true, they seem to think it's fun, too.

He never hesitated to tell us about the time one of them had perched on his back while he was flying, turning him into a taxi while he tried and failed to throw it off.

So yeah. Suffice to say, Tobias isn't fond of the things.

Which probably was part of the reason why Tinyel was in the form it was.

It had the normal head and neck of a crow, but then the feathers slowly turned into fur and it just turned into this long body with stubby little feet and a long, poofy tail that twitched lazily against my neck. It was pitch black, except for the tip of its tail, which was white. Its eyes were pale pink, like it was some sort of albino, except for the part where it was the exact opposite.

Aside from Macalia's obvious attempts to draw Tinyel into a mimicking game, no one had made any comment on my daemon's form. Tinyel had been taking on forms like this since even before we'd been released from the hospital.

I'd have liked to say that they were starting to get used to it, but they were all trying so hard not to stare that they were looking anywhere but at me.

All except for Aximili, who was making sure to keep eye contact with me while he ate. Another skill he was practicing-multitasking while eating, both to help distract him from the flavor, and so that he could still be aware of his surroundings. He would need to learn to keep in control before we ever took him out in public again. It was dangerous to lose track of your surroundings, especially for an Andalite in morph. None of us would ever forget our disastrous first attempt to share our culture with him, where he'd begun to demorph in pure panic after losing control at the food court and getting chased down by angry mall-cops. It was only by miraculously good luck that none of them had been Controllers. But that was why he had to practice, so nothing like that would ever happen again.

So far he was doing good.

Everyone that could be here was here, and everyone was about as comfortable as they were going to get.

I sat up from my slouch, and leaned back until my shoulders were touching the wall behind me. I let my feet swing slowly against the dresser, the heels of my shoes stopping just a breath away from the wood so I wouldn't actually scuff it or make any noise. The cast on my arm I let rest on my stomach, heavy and unwieldy, but no longer agonizingly painful. I'd been given prescription pain medicine that I took every day.

I opened my mouth to speak-

-And Jake interrupted me. Again.

"You're not coming on any missions until you're fully healed." He said firmly. Funera twitched her tail and gazed levelly at me from where she was sitting next to him.

The perfect act, both of them pretending to be the reasonable ones, the rational ones. It suddenly made me want to laugh, at the same time that it sparked anger inside me. But I pushed both of those thoughts away.

I stared back unwaveringly, first into her eyes, and then into his.

"That is not what I called you here to talk about." I said, as calmly as I could despite the anger trying to rise back up. I've never had much control of my temper. Especially not when it comes to being insulted. "I'm not going to argue with you, Jake. If you say I'm not going on any missions, then I'm not going on any missions." It was so hard to keep my voice even, so hard to keep it steady. But somehow I managed it, somehow I managed to keep my patience and not snap at him.

It was perhaps the fifth time since I'd broken my arm, and my wrist, and my ribs that we'd had this conversation. The fifth time since I'd gotten covered in deep lacerations and bruises and been humiliated infront of hundreds of people. He just couldn't seem to believe me when I told him that I was fine with sitting out missions for a while.

I wanted to wonder why, I wanted to pretend I didn't know. But I knew why he was repeating this argument over and over again even though he'd already won. He wanted me to argue back, he wanted me to re-solidify my role as the reckless, bloodthirsty warrior he tried to pretend I was. That was the normal team dynamic we had. Jake was the serious leader, Cassie always worried about morality, Marco cracking stupid Jokes, Aximili calling Jake Prince, and me, Rachel, eager as always to get bloody. And Tobias, of course, who...didn't really do much, to be honest.

Jake wanted me to argue with him, so that we could go back to being normal. But that wasn't normal. It was...it was a coping strategy, or something, for dealing with all the crap we were going through. But that didn't mean it was healthy, and it sure as hell didn't mean it was true.

Jake wanted me to argue with him, wanted me to fall back into my role as the out of control berserker. But I wasn't going to play that game, just like I wasn't going to play Marco's game to get Tinyel to take on a normal form.

Jake's expression didn't change, but Funera's demeanor shifted, just barely. Before, she'd been on the edge of aggression, but now I saw her shoot an uncertain glance in Alexander's direction.

I didn't bother looking at Alexander to see how he reacted, or if he even reacted at all. Cassie was upset with me for some reason I couldn't fathom. She'd barely been in the same room with me for five seconds in the whole time since she'd morphed me, and she'd not once met my eyes.

I'd managed to get past most of my creeped-out-ness of knowing that she'd morphed into me, enough that I started to think that maybe she felt guilty about it. But she didn't have to be. Tinyel had turned into the signal that meant we were being controlled, and we'd all agreed from the beginning that if one of us got infested, we wanted the others to morph us if it meant keeping our cover safe.

In my order of preferred emergency morphers, Cassie was at the top, then Aximili, then Jake, and then Marco. She was the first person I would choose to acquire my DNA if it had to be done. She was my best friend, and I knew that she, above all else, would be respectful.

I'd wanted to talk to her, tell her that she didn't have to feel bad about morphing me, because it was something I'd already agreed to, but I never gotten the chance. This was the longest she'd been in the same room with me since the whole thing started, and even now she was looking ready to bolt for the door.

It wasn't the room that was making her uncomfortable, I quietly acknowledged to myself, it was me.

But that was something I could deal with later, after I explained, after I told them my secrets, after I finally stood up for myself and made sure that they would never tell lies about me again.

"I didn't call you here to argue about missions." I said again, taking a moment to stare directly into Jake and Funera's eyes before sweeping my gaze across the rest of the room. "I called you here because...because I have something I need to tell you. Something really personal that I want to trust you with."

And I did want to trust them with this. I wanted to know that I _could_ trust them. They'd made mistakes, but so had I. We could move forward. We _would_ move forward. I would make sure of it. We'd go back to normal, but it would be a new normal, a better one. One that didn't make me hate myself for who they kept pretending I was.

Cassie was finally looking in my general direction, and Alexander had jumped into her lap, and was peering out over the tops of her knees.

Marco's expression had turned serious, Jake was still standing like he was expecting a fight, and Tobias quietly ruffled his wings over by the window.

And Aximili continued slowly eating his pretzels, his eyes locked onto mine.

I breathed in, and then out. "Okay." I said, holding my hands out infront of me, a maneuver somewhat more difficult than normal thanks to the cast, but I managed it.

This was the signal Tinyel and I had chosen.

Without a moment of hesitation, it slithered off my neck and down my arms until it was resting in my hands, sitting up on its hind legs. In an instant, it grew wings to match the crow's head, and held them out on display. Once again, they were speckled with white, just like it had been in the hospital room. Though, this time, the rest of its body stayed black. After a moment of making sure that everyone had seen its wings, it folded them across its back and made them disappear, and settled back down onto all fours, its long back arched up in a weird way, like those paintings of Chinese dragons.

They were all paying attention now, Aximili especially. He'd even stopped eating his pretzels, one hand frozen mid way to his mouth, his eyes glued to my daemon, expression curious and open.

"This," I said into the nervous silence of the room after a beat, "This is not PTSD. This is not me losing my mind. This is not something the war has done to me, this is something that I've always been. It just...took me a while to acknowledge it, is all."

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Cassie's eyes were wide, her mouth hanging slightly open as though she weren't even aware of it. Alexander was no longer peering out over her knees.

"A few months ago," I continued, "After my dad moved away, after we went back down to the Yeerk pool, my mom came downstairs in the middle of the night and found me crying on the living room couch."

Jake and Marco and Tobias all tensed. I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking that I was going too far out of my role as warrior. I wasn't supposed to tell them that I was human enough to cry. Only Cassie and Aximili didn't seem to be upset.

"I couldn't tell her that I was crying because I'd lost control of my morph and almost killed you, Jake." I said, sending him a single, apologetic, glance. "I couldn't tell her that I was angry and afraid of losing my dad, and that I was terrified of losing the whole planet. I couldn't tell her why I was crying, why I was sobbing and I couldn't stop. So I told her another one of my secrets, another thing about me that makes me cry."

Tinyel shifted again, this time growing bat wings and spines along its back, making it look even more like a weird dragon. It sat up, straight-backed this time, and turned its gaze to meet the eyes of everyone in the room.

"Tinyel," I said, "Isn't male. And it isn't female. Tinyel is an it." I didn't wait for them to react. "This is what I explained to my mom when she found me crying on the couch at three in the morning. And in return, she explained something to me, something I'd-forgotten." Just like I'd forgotten the reasons I was fighting, just like I'd forgotten that I wasn't a bad person for fighting in this war.

I looked at Jake, lowering Tinyel slightly so that I could meet his gaze. "I don't know if you remember," I said softly, "That time we all went up to Grandma and Grandpa's house, and it was snowing?"

For a moment, his expression was still hard, but then I saw confusion flicker through his eyes, and his brow furrowed. And then I saw the recognition, and the realization. He remembered.

I nodded, and turned back to address the others again while Jake stood there, floored. "When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, our family took us all up to our grandparent's house for the holidays. They live up north, and that year, it snowed. It was the first time we'd ever seen it, so we stayed outside playing in it for hours before we had to come back in."

Marco just looked confused, I couldn't tell what Tobias was thinking, and Aximili was just enraptured. I wondered if they had snow on the Andalite homeworld.

"Well," I said, as Tinyel spread its wings in preparation, "When it was time for us to come inside, I decided that it was too much fun playing in the snow. So when my aunt dragged me in, Tinyel stayed outside to keep playing."

To demonstrate, Tinyel leapt off my hands and into the air, and flew to the far side of the room, somehow managing to make the un-aerodynamic body work gracefully despite all the laws of evolution and physics that said it should have gone crashing to the floor. Its body was ungainly, its wings too small. But that didn't mean anything to my daemon. It moved like a master of the air, even going so far as to do a small flip towards the ceiling, before it folded its wings and landed gracefully on the headboard of the bed.

The room was longer than it was wide, and average size for a hotel room. But it wasn't the distance that mattered, so much as the concept.

If we'd been standing on a football field, Tinyel could have just as easily flown to the other side.

Cassie was now even more openly gaping, her wide-eyed gaze switching back and forth between Tinyel and I, her hands clutching at her knees so hard her knuckles had turned pale.

Tinyel flew back to me, and landed on my shoulders before flopping bonelessly against my neck like a living scarf.

I tried to ignore Marco's skeptical expression, and continued speaking before he could try to interrupt. "I didn't realize that it was such a big deal for my daemon to be more than a few feet away from me at the time." I said, "When my mom asked where Tinyel was, I just told her it was still outside playing in the snow. She freaked out, thinking someone was trying to kidnap me. But after Tinyel came back inside and I explained that it didn't hurt for my daemon to be far away from me, everyone calmed back down. And after that, my parents decided to get me tested."

At the time, I'd just assumed that they were tests everyone had to take. And then I eventually just forgot about them altogether, until my mom reminded me.

"They tested me." I said, into the room, "And I was diagnosed with autism."

The room was silent and still for a few moments, whether in shock or disbelief, I wasn't sure.

That is, it was still until Aximili hesitantly raised his hand. "What is this...autism? Ah tism. Autism. Ism. I am unfamiliar with this word."

I opened my mouth to try to explain, but this time, it was Marco who beat me to it.

"It's when someone is born different, Ax." He said, and for once, there was no trace of humor in his voice. No trace of mockery or scorn. Not even a hint of derision. In fact, his voice was almost...gentle. "They can do things normal people can't, and they can't do some things that normal people can. Like, someone with autism might be so good at math that they never have to use a calculator, even with the really big numbers. But they also might not be able to talk, or at least they have trouble talking or understanding other people."

"Normally, daemons can only travel a few feet away from their human before they can't go any further." Macalia put in, sliding off Marco's shoulders so that she could jump to the floor next to Aximili as a bobcat, "But a lot of autistic daemons can travel a lot farther without feeling any pain."

"And on the other hand, some autistic daemons can barely go a few inches from their human. They have to constantly be touching, or else it's as painful as a normal person's daemon going more than a dozen feet." Marco continued, "No one really knows why some people are born this way while others aren't, but brains are complicated things, and we've only just begun to study them."

I couldn't help but stare. I'd expected a lot of reactions, especially from Marco. But this was not one of them. He was being informative and helpful and...not at all mocking. He was being _nice_. And not in the fake-nice that I'd been fearing.

"Autistic brains are wired differently from normal brains." Cassie added in quietly, so suddenly that I almost jumped. "They think differently than we do, they notice different things, their senses are attuned differently. It's almost like we're two completely different species."

Part of me flinched at the choice of words, before my ears caught up and listened to her tone of voice. Her words could have been cutting, edged, but they weren't. She was just stating facts as she knew them with the same sort of professionalism that she used when telling us about a new animal she wanted us to morph.

Somehow, she sounded like she was speaking from experience, but I couldn't figure out how that was possible. Unless _she_ was…?

But no. No, the way she was talking, she made it clear that she was normal, but somehow she'd gotten first-hand experience on what being autistic was like. But that didn't make any sense.

Aximili distracted me from thinking on that any deeper when his eyes flew wide, he gasped so loudly and suddenly you'd think he'd been kicked in the stomach, and he actually _dropped his bag of pretzels_ when his hands flew to cover his mouth in an all-too-human gesture of shock.

The spilled pretzels rolled over the carpet, and the bag made crinkling noises as it settled on the floor.

Aximili stared at me with eyes as wide as saucers, both hands clapped over his mouth. I had the feeling that, if he'd had an animal daemon, it would have had all of its fur standing on end.

"Um." I said after he remained sitting like that for a few awkward seconds, "Are you okay…?"

He spoke through his fingers, his wide eyes never leaving mine, his voice shaking.. "I-we Andalites-we also have something like this on our planet." He said haltingly, quietly, as though afraid that if he spoke any louder he would attract attention, "It is-" he hunched his shoulders, making himself look smaller. "It is...something to be ashamed of. Something to be hidden away out of thought. We call them-" he hummed softly, the human equivalent of telepathic silence Andalites used to indicate hesitation. "We call them...we call them retarded. It...is not a pleasant word. It...it means-"

"It means slow." Marco put in when Aximili stumbled over his words again, his tone still gentle in a way I'd never imagined it could be, "It means they don't learn as quickly as normal Andalites, right? Yeah. We humans have that word too. And it isn't pleasant for us, either." His voice took on a hard edge with the last sentence, his expression cold.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tobias flinch.

But Aximili didn't notice that, he was too busy looking up at Marco, and then down at Macalia, who was sitting next to him on the floor as a grey and white bobcat. "Yes." He said,d nodding, slowly lowering his hands, "That is what it means. Andalites who are-are-" He didn't want to say it. You could see it in his face how much he didn't want to say the word. His face was burning red and he kept blinking. It looked like it was strangling him.

"Autistic is the proper term for it." I suggested quietly, hoping to make it easier for him, and trying to reign in on my own sympathetic reaction. He looked like he was ready to cry, and it's hard for me to resist the urge to cry if I see other people doing it. I almost added, 'at least for humans.', because he always made sure to keep a distinction between Andalites and humans. It was always 'we Andalites' and 'you humans.' But this time, it didn't feel right to put up a wall between our species.

Aximili nodded again, oblivious to my tiny internal debate, more vigorously this time. He finally dropped his hands to his lap, and clasped them together as though he weren't sure what to do with them now that they were empty. "Andalites who are _autistic_ are...they are what you described, Rachel, and Marco. They are different. Born different. Their thoughts...are disorganized. They do not understand some of the simplest of concepts, and some of them, the way they speak-" He ducked his head. "Some of them cannot even be understood. The way their thoughts are arranged is impossible to understand. It takes great practice and, and great patience to understand them."

And suddenly I knew. And I wasn't sure how I hadn't seen it before.

And it was just as suddenly that I noticed that Aximili had stopped playing with sounds the way he normally did. The tension was in his voice, carefully controlled.

The understanding arose suddenly in my mind.

Before, he'd been safe to play with sounds as he pleased-he was, after all, an alien. He wasn't expected to act perfectly human, he wasn't expected to act perfectly normal. He was an alien in a human's body. He was expected to act weird.

He hadn't known that humans knew about autism, he hadn't known that some of us could be the way that some of his species were. But now he knew that we knew, so now he was trying to hide, trying to pretend to be something he wasn't. He didn't want us to think of him the way other Andalites did.

Just like I'd been doing. Just like I'd been denying it, just like I'd been hiding it.

"Aximili." I said firmly, and he looked up at me. But that wasn't good enough.

I slid forward off the dresser, Tinyel clinging to my shirt collar with tiny, dull claws. I sat down with my legs folded under me, and leaned down to rest my weight on my one good arm until we were eye-level.

Sometimes eye contact was awkward. But I remembered the moment with the crocodile, while it had stared into my eyes while it was still morphing out of my body. I remembered the moment of silence that had fallen over the world, I remembered the feeling of being watched, of being judged, and being found _worthy_.

I remembered that feeling as I looked into Aximili's dark eyes, and having him stare back at me wasn't as awkward as it usually felt. Sometimes eyes just seemed empty and blank, like looking into clouded glass, but now it felt like I could see past his eyes and into his soul. I could read all of his thoughts and feelings as if he were speaking to me telepathically.

And I hoped he could see the same in mine as Tinyel leaned forward and reached out one tiny paw.

"Aximili," I said, as my daemon reached out to him, and he lifted one hesitant hand to reach back, "There is nothing wrong with you."

Tinyel's paw touched the back of his hand, claws retracted, nothing but soft fur and velvety foot pads.

The rest of the room had fallen silent, not even the sound of the others' breathing marring the stillness.

Warmth brushed against the area that I thought of as my hand, and emotions flooded my mind. They were too many to count, too many to name. They swirled like a whirlwind, like a storm. Like waves crashing against rocks, drawing back only to rush forward again with the same intensity.

And I understood him perfectly. Because the same storm of emotions lived in me, and I was only just now learning how to tread their waters.

A shadow that was made more of thought than any real absence of light crossed my mind, and I let my eyes slip shut, knowing without knowing how that I would be able to see it better.

And for the second time, I watched and felt a part of me that was too deep to name look out at what I was looking at, at the same time that a part of Aximili looked at me. The two things looked at each other, and in a way that I can only describe as _golden_ , they communicated with each other.

I don't know if they used words, or thoughts, if they danced, or if they just instinctively _knew_. But however they did it, and whatever they were, they spoke to one another, and they came to a decision.

When I opened my eyes, tears were shimmering in Axilimi's, but this time, they weren't from sorrow, or grief, or loneliness, or fear.

These were tears of joy, of hope.

Because, for just an instant, a spark of golden light appeared between us, and melted into his chest, right over his human heart.

For a second, his body glowed from within, making his eyes shine gold, before the light seemed to move, shift, swirling visibly through his veins until it settled on his arms, making them glow so brightly for a few seconds that it was hard to look at.

And when the light had faded, there upon his dark skin were even darker markings. Pitch black, they swirled over the backs of his hands and arced gracefully up towards his elbows. They seemed to both move and stay still, like they weren't sure yet whether or not they were in motion. It was like a living tattoo, but warm and alive.

 _Fire_.

The word, the _name_ popped into my head without hesitation. I blinked, and somehow the moving, not-moving lines traces upon his skin suddenly took on a new shape.

They were flames, even if their lines were drawn in a language that I suddenly knew was alien. They were flames, that flickered and danced even while they stayed still.

They were a symbol.

Aximili stared down at his hands, at his arms, at the flames twisting and writing in graceful black ink over his dark skin.

They were a symbol, they were fire.

And looking into Aximili's wonder-filled eyes, I knew that they were a daemon.

* * *

I didn't know it then, but Andalites had what they called birth-marks. It wasn't the same sort of birthmark that humans had, though. Instead of being born with a marking as humans sometimes were, the patterns slowly appeared in their fur as they aged. Right around the time that they went through the Andalite version of puberty, their birth-mark would appear. It could take on any shape or color, but it tended to follow certain patterns.

Those destined to become great warriors had markings appear on their wrists, ankles, and tail. Scientists and mathematicians got markings that started over their main eyes, then trailed all the way down their back to the base of the tail. Medical doctors got markings on their palms and along their sides.

The markings could be anything. Spots, stripes, rosettes, even numbers or words.

There were thousands of documented patterns, but because the Andalites had been at war for so long, because they were a people trained almost entirely for war, the patterns that meant _warrior_ , and _scientist_ and _doctor_ were now the most common.

And once those marks faded in, your life was pretty much set in stone. No one would _force_ you to become a warrior if you really didn't want to, of course, but you wouldn't really be able to succeed at anything else. Not because you were lacking in talent, but because no one would _want_ you to be anything else. Refusing the call of your birth-mark meant that you were refusing your destiny, refusing the path that would best help you serve your society.

And if an Andalite was of no use to its society, then it was of no use to anyone.

Aximili was a child, just like the rest of us. An alien child, yes, but no less of a child simply because he wasn't human, and hadn't been born on Earth.

Andalites were different from humans. They were more advanced than us, and that was the way they liked it. They looked like something straight out of a fairy tale.

But they were still people. They were still sentient, still living, breathing, people.

So why had I ever thought that they didn't have daemons?

They were aliens. They didn't live on Earth. Their culture had evolved on an alien planet so far away I probably couldn't even hold all of the numbers in my head. Of course they had daemons.

And of course they were nothing like ours.

Humans had always looked to animals for guidance, for meaning, for lessons.

Not so for the Andalites.

They had daemons, but they didn't take on the form of animals. They didn't speak, because why add one more voice to a whole planet that was constantly singing with thoughts?

Our daemons took on the form of any animal we could imagine, and when we came of age, they settled, into an animal form that represented to the entire world everything that we were, and everything that we could be. Animals were our symbols, they were our language. Our daemons were animals _because_ we had stories about the tortoise and the hare. _Because_ we knew that foxes were clever tricksters and bears were grumpy old men.

Our daemons were animals because that was the language we understood.

And Andalites' birth-marks were markings, because that was the language _they_ understood.

Andalites were solitary by nature. They weren't commity based animals like humans were. Their planet was a cakewalk compared to Earth. They hadn't needed to band together just to survive, back in their ancient times. There were no sprawling cities like New York on their homeworld, because for Andalites, survival didn't depend on whether or not someone else was watching your back. Survival didn't depend on working together to survive an ice-age or the threat of famine.

Andalites were the dominant species on their planet, not because they fought their way to the top, but because there was just nothing else that could or would challenge them. They had no natural predators, so they had nothing to fear. They didn't eat meat, so they never had to worry about going hungry if they didn't manage to catch anything on a hunt.

They lived in small family groups, wandering, nomadic, without a care in the world.

But they would talk to each other, each family, even if they never met personally. They would carve shapes into wood or stone with their tail blades, leaving messages, news, warnings, directions behind, for whoever would happen to find them. Sometimes it was a simple arrow pointing to a nice field for grazing, sometimes it was a warning about unstable ground, or some particularly vicious rapids at a river crossing. And sometimes it was more complicated things. Stories, poems, art. Love letters.

And this was the language that Andalites understood, down to their deepest instincts. Even when the distance was too great for throught speak, you could always talk to someone by leaving them a message. Even if you never spoke face to face, you could always know that the other was well.

Aximili was a child, just like we were.

And just like us, his daemon hadn't settled yet when he was thrust into this war. His role in life, his story, hadn't been written yet.

His birth-mark hadn't faded in yet.

And he was alone. Alone, in the telepathic silence that held no static of hesitation, of the promise of words to come. He was mired in crushing, drowning silence, the only telepathic creature on a world of aliens who spoke with sounds made by mouths instead of minds.

When his ship crash landed in the ocean, he'd been nothing more than a child. We'd all been children, children so far in over our heads that we couldn't even see the surface. So far over our heads that we dared to think that nothing could hurt us, that it was all just a game we were playing, that none if it could really hurt us, that everything would end happily.

And then Marco had almost died, and reality had hit us like a slap to the face.

This was real. This was war.

We were all growing up, faster than we should have. Faster than anyone else around us.

Melissa and the other kids at our school would never understand what we were going through. They would never understand the things we had done to protect them.

And the Andalites? They would never understand what Aximili was going through. No one his age had ever been left alone for so long, without any other Andalite to fill that telepathic silence.

So of course his daemon, his birth-mark, wouldn't fit the patterns that were so familiar. Warrior, scientist, doctor. Such simple labels, such simple stories.

But what we were doing wasn't simple. It was complicated and messed up and _scary_.

And Aximili hadn't been home in so long. Hadn't heard another of his people's voices for so long, that I think some of that fear ingrained itself within his very mind, his very soul.

Out of all of us, Aximili had the most to fear. The most to adapt to.

He had a daemon, even if it wasn't something we could see, even if it wasn't something he could hear.

And that day, when we let so many secrets be known, something in him changed.

His daemon appeared, not slowly fading in over the course of weeks, of months, but in a flash of light, in a burst of gold.

Fire.

That was the name for the black lines that danced from his hands and up his arms, both in his human morph and Andalite.

Fire.

That was the name of his daemon, even if it didn't look like a daemon as we knew them, even if it seemed like nothing more than a tattoo.

The lines were blurring between our two species, and even if Aximili didn't understand the significance of fire, it was a symbol that every human understood, no matter where they came from.

Fire was life. Fire was change. Fire was _hope_.

* * *

I couldn't go on any missions, so that meant that when the others went out to follow Jeremy Jason McCole on his yacht to find out if he was a Controller or not, I had to stay behind.

Which was absolutely, wonderfully fine with me.

It gave me time to hang out with Sara and Jordan, watching TV and relaxing in the giant hotel bed, stuffing our faces with ice cream I'd ordered for us from room service.

Jordan and Sara were curled up together with their daemons, Luayin and Tayali, both of them in the form of black cats with golden eyes to match Tinyel, so identical in size and shape that if they hadn't been touching, I wouldn't have been able to tell who was who. Sara was closest to me, separated only by a pillow that we both leaned against, with Tayali half on her legs, and half snuggled up with Luayin, who was likewise half curled on Jordan's lap. They both had their ice cream bowls by their legs, so that their daemons could lick it while they scooped it out with a spoon.

Tinyel was draped above all of our heads, front paws dangling down off the headboard to just barely brush the top of my head when I moved. I'd already given it half our share of ice-cream, so the rest in the bowl was just for me. Jordan had chosen mint chocolate chip, Sara plain vanilla with tons of rainbow sprinkles, and I'd gotten moose tracks. Tinyel was still happily licking its lips from all the chocolate.

We were rewatching the first season of _The X-Files_ , kindly lent to us by Marco through Jake. It had been Jordan's idea. She was obsessed with the show, and-unlike some other people-didn't find it the least bit scary. And, she argued, I was supposed to be getting bedrest. And what better way to do that than watching a cool show?

We were currently on episode three. Also known as _Squeeze_. Also known as one of the creepiest episodes in the entire series. At least in my opinion.

Seriously though. It's so freaky. That guy, he just. He freaks me out. And sitting there watching it then, really wasn't helping my sudden issue with claustrophobia. But Sara and Jordan-and okay, if we're being honest, mostly Jordan-were enjoying it, and there was no way I was ruining the marathon by chickening out of an episode just because some guy gave me the willies.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Tinel stand up to stretch languidly, before it casually jumped down and into my lap, careful to make itself light so that I wouldn't be jostled, or spill my slowly-melting ice-cream. That stint in the forest hadn't done me any favors, and I was pretty sure that one of my cracked ribs had actually gotten _worse_ because of it. Not that I could _tell_ anyone that, of course. Because then they would want to know how I'd managed that when all I'd done was hang around in the hospital and lounge in my hotel room.

I suppose I could always say I fell off my bed. My misadventure with the crocodile pit and then my collapsing house had apparently earned me the moniker, "Falling Girl". Cassie had been the one to tell me about the rumors flying around school when we talked over the phone the day after our meeting, and had joked that it wasn't so bad, because she could be my sidekick, Dropping Chick. It was during that conversation that she also subtly clued me in on the results of the mission to spy on Jeremy Jason. Apparently, they'd managed to find his yacht, and the good news was that he wasn't a Controller yet.

The bad news was that he would be soon. He'd agreed to sign up for some minor, experimental surgery in exchange for Visser Three-who was apparently pretending to be some big shot from Hollywood or something-to get him access to new acting roles. Apparently he felt like he was stagnating in his current role in _Power House_ , and wanted to branch out, find new, more exciting roles.

Maybe a few days ago, I would have been devastated. But I couldn't fault the kid for wanting things to change. I'd been stuck in a rut for a while, and I was hopefully starting to get out of it.

It was just too goddamn bad that he thought he could accomplish that by becoming a voluntary Controller. All he would be doing was signing away his freedom, and he wouldn't even know it until his head was being forcibly dunked into a miniature Yeerk pool.

Tomorrow, he would be appearing on _The Barry and Cindy Sue Show_ , where he would presumably do his part to endorse the Sharing. Or at least, the Yeerk that had taken over his body would. Little did he, or the rest of the Yeerks know, but the rest of the Animorphs would be tagging along, hidden in various morphs, waiting for the moment to strike.

The plan was to either spirit him away before he could have his segment, or if all else failed, at least cause enough chaos that the show would have to be taken off the air. If they managed to grab him, they'd bring him to the Dig, and meanwhile, Erek would take his place as though nothing had happened, and would pretend to be Jeremy Jason, except for the part where he _wouldn't_ endorse the Sharing.

Kidnapping the Controller was the preferable plan. Even if he didn't make the endorsement on this show, he was a teen heartthrob. He had every opportunity in the world to make his announcement, and that would pretty much convert every teenaged girl, and honestly, some guys, into voluntary controllers overnight. I'd already tested the waters with Jordan, and she'd literally _leapt_ at the chance that joining a club would give her the chance to meet the guy.

But none of that was my responsibility. I wouldn't be going on the mission, the first of what would probably be many until I was fully healed and able to morph without completely blowing my cover.

Tinyel circled around in my lap once, like a dog making a bed, before settling down in my lap, purring gently, and allowing a few white spots to shimmer over its pitch black fur, just for a moment, so quick I would have missed it if I blinked.

I smiled, despite myself, despite the fact that a tiny part of my brain was still wondering if the creepy, yellow-eyed liver-eating guy from The X-Filew was hiding under the bed.

Tinyel stayed as a black cat for the next few hours, mimicking Luayin and Tayali as much as they were mimicking it.

I wasn't a touchy-feely sort of person. Touching other people, even for something as simple and brief as a hug, made my skin crawl, no matter who was doing the touching. According to my mom, I never initiated hand-holding with her or my dad, and only ever put up for it for as long as it took to cross the street, or when it was necessary, like we were in a crowded area. I never reached out for her hand by my own initiative, not even when I was upset or scared.

The only times I put up with hugging was when we went to visit my grandparents, and only then because it would take too much effort to shy away, and explain that I didn't like getting touched. I didn't interact with them often enough for something like that to _not_ hurt their feelings, so I didn't make a big deal out of it during the holidays.

But mom knew that I liked my personal space, and so did Jordan and Sara. It wasn't a big issue, they just knew that they needed to ask before they hugged me or anything physical like that. It didn't mean I didn't love them, and they knew that.

That was why Tinyel was a black cat, and why Luayin and Tayali were mimicking it. We couldn't be physically close, but sharing the same shape was almost the same thing, and it brought about a sort of kinship that physical touch couldn't really convey.

For just a few hours, we were all seeing the world in similar ways, and we understood each other a little better. It was something we did pretty often, whenever I was babysitting or we were all hanging out together. I know a lot of people think it isn't cool to hang out with your little siblings, but those people are, to be honest, usually jerks.

We watched a few more episodes before Sara declared that she had to use the bathroom, and Jordan paused the TV so she wouldn't miss anything. I took the opportunity to set my now empty bowl on the nightstand, entirely too aware of the gap between it and the bed as I reached out with my good arm.

You'd think killing people in my spare time would make me immune to scary monsters on the TV.

You'd be wrong.

It makes it even worse.

Because normal people, at least they can tell themselves that it wasn't real, it was just from a show or a movie, nothing like that _really_ existed.

But I couldn't really tell myself that. Because for all I knew, there was an alien species out there somewhere that could do _exactly_ what the yellow-eyed guy did. Plus, it was way too much like the way Yeerks took over people's brains for me to pretend to be okay. And come _on_. Being afraid of things hiding under the bed is like, an instinctual fear for humans. So I was perfectly within my rights to eye that gap under the bed as I put my bowl down on the nightstand.

Perfectly within my rights.

If only Marco could have seen me. That would have blown his whole 'fearless Xena' theory out of the water.

Not that I _liked_ the idea of them knowing I was afraid, not at all. But the way they'd been talking about me lately, it just felt so _wrong._ I tried to be brave, to not give into the fear, to give them something to hold onto, and they'd turned it against me. I'd tried to support them, tried to show them that we _could_ win this war, we _could_ complete this mission, no matter how scared we were, and they'd gone and decided that meant that I _wasn't afraid at all_. They'd gone and decided that, because I could push through my fear to do what needed to be done-something you'd think at least _Marco_ would understand, that it meant I _enjoyed_ fighting. That it meant I _enjoyed_ killing people and getting my hands covered in blood.

They'd gone and decided that I _was glad this war had happened_. And I hadn't had the chance to bring it up in our meeting, not really. It was too big of an issue, too big of a problem to be solved in just a few minutes of talking.

Just because they knew that I was autistic didn't mean they'd stop thinking I was crazy. Just because they knew that me being autistic was the cause for Tinyel's unorthodox forms, _didn't mean they wouldn't still judge me for them_.

They'd gotten it into their heads-and into _mine_ -that the only reason I was fighting this war was because I _enjoyed it_. Was because I looked forward to missions, not because I wanted this war to be over as soon as possible, but because I loved the act of violence. I loved ripping Hork-Bajir open from jaw to stomach. I loved watching their steaming guts spill out into the ground. I loved bursting Taxxons like water balloons, and being drenched in their disgusting, liquidy intestines. I loved watching others of their kind swarm, fighting each other to be the first in line to devour their fallen comrade.

My friends had told me so many times why _they_ thought I was fighting that I forgot it wasn't true. I wasn't glad that this war had started. How could anyone ever even _contemplate_ thinking that?

I leaned back against my pillow, Tinyel digging claws gently into my legs to hold it in place, and to ground me in the present. I might have dealt with my allergy, but my temper was rising, and if I got angry now, the rest of the day would be most likely be ruined. There was no use getting angry at my friends when they weren't even here. I could save that for another day, another time.

Preferably a time when I could yell at them face to face, without having to worry about people in the surrounding rooms overhearing our conversation. So it would have to wait until we could meet at Cassie's barn, or the Dig.

I took a few, deep, steadying breaths, pretending that I was just doing the breathing exercises the doctors had told me to do, instead of trying to get my anger back under control. I was supposed to breathe really deeply and slowly every few hours, so my lungs didn't get messed up by my ribs. Peoplr with broken or cracked ribs tended to want to breathe shallowly, and I guess that can cause infections or something in your lungs.

I managed to calm my burning rage right before Sara got back from the bathroom, and held my hand out to stop Jordan when she immediately went to press the play button on the remote.

"Hey, uh-" It was exactly like the first conversation I'd had with Aximili, which would have been sort of funny, if that conversation hadn't ended with everyone involved crying. I tried not to focus on that, though. "Before we keep watching, I just, uh, wanted to tell you guys something about Tinyel."

Almost immediately, four pairs of eyes, two brown, and two golden, rounded over and darted to land on my daemon, still in the shape of a black cat.

Jordan's mouth dropped open, about to speak, but her daemon beat her to it, leaping to his feet, his fur standing on end as he practically vibrated in excitement. "Tinyel, did you settle? Are you settled now?" Luayin was too excited to hold onto the cat shape, and his fur flickered white and grey, growing longer for a few seconds, before he gave up on trying to stay a cat, and then suddenly he was an opossum.

Jordan scooped him up immediately, hugging him to her chest. Her eyes practically sparkled as she looked first at me, then at Tinyel, then back to me. "It Yu right? Did he settle?"

Sara, always the quiet one, said nothing, but leaned forward, Tayali, now that the mimicking game seemed to be over, slowly melting into a small red and yellow snake.

For a second I got distracted staring at him, the words, _red on black, friend Jack. Black on red, Jack is dead_ ghosting through my mind. It had never made sense to me. Did it mean that if there was more black than red, it wasn't venomous? Or was it the other way around? Staring at Tayali gave me absolutely no indication of whether or not he was dangerous. I'd have to look up his form on the Web later, since he probably didn't know what it was called.

I shook my head, both to get myself back on track, and to deny their excitement. "No, Tinyel hasn't settled yet. See?"

I picked my daemon up under its arms, and it obligingly changed shapes, leaving behind the black cat in favor of a similarly dark-furred ferret, drooping comfortably boneless in my hands. Jordan and Sara's disappointment increased tenfold.

"I'm going to soon, though." Tinyel spoke suddenly, without preamble or hesitation.

I wasn't expecting my daemon to speak, and for a moment I just stared down at it, bewildered and skeptical. The words, "As _what_?" finally managed to leave my mouth.

How could Tinyel even _think_ about settling when I was just barely starting to figure myself out?

It wiggled its little ferret feet, and swished its tail, still content to hang by its arms in my hands. "A surprise." It replied, tilting its head back to bare stark white teeth at me in a grin. Red eyes flashed with unconcealed mirth, and it let its mouth close, hiding its teeth, while the corners turned upwards until it was just smiling happily up at me, completely and utterly serene and self-assured.

Apparently my daemon knew something that I didn't.

I had to ask. There was no way I couldn't.

"If you already know what you're going to be, why not just...settle _now_?"

But I knew the answer before the words were even fully out of my mouth. I wasn't ready to settle. So neither was Tinyel. Just because I knew more about myself now than I did before, didn't mean I didn't have more to learn.

Just because Tinyel knew what it would settle as, didn't mean it was ready to stop changing.

I shook my head. "Nevermind," I said, "Don't answer that."

And then I looked back up at my sisters, while I draped Tinyel around my neck so my hands were free. Light as a feather or not, I still had the cast on my arm to contend with.

It let itself hang, still boneless, across my shoulders, its short, thick fur tickling my neck, and the strong but familiar odor unique to ferrets filling my nose.

I ignored the part of me that was wondering if this would be its final shape. "No, Tinyel hasn't settled yet." I said, "Although _apparently_ it will be soon. What I wanted to tell you guys was that Tinyel, well...Tinyel isn't a boy. Or a girl. It's something in between, which is why I call it an _it_ instead of he or she. I was...wondering if you guys could start doing that too."

There were a few moments of silence, where you could practically feel the confusion clouding the air.

But I didn't know how else to explain it.

Eventually, Tayali spoke, wrapping slowly but loosely around Sara's neck, like a red and yellow scarf without end. I was pretty sure he hadn't been that long when he first took on the shape. "But…" His tongue flickered black out of yellow-pebbled lips, and red eyes glittered confusion and something that might have been fear. "Does that mean you're not our sister anymore?"

I frowned, confused. Tinyel spoke again, though, apparently understanding the question better than I did. "No, Rachel is still a girl. We're still your sister, it's just that I'm…" It shrugged helplessly, lifting itself up a bit so that it was couched instead of lying down, so that it could stare directly into Tayali's fearful eyes. "We're still your sister, Tayali. I promise that won't _ever_ change. It's just that I'm not a boy like everyone thought I was, that's all. Nothing else has changed."

Jordan's eyes kept glancing towards the door, as though she were contemplating running out of it. But when she spoke, her voice was low, barely a whisper. She looked at me, her eyes wide, her hands clutching Yualin, still as an opossum, to her chest so hard that her knuckles were white. "Does mom know?"

And it suddenly occurred to me why they were so afraid. It had just been all over the news, just last week. A young boy barely a few months older than I was had gotten kicked out onto the street by his parents after they found out that his daemon, which had recently settled as a lion, was a boy.

The kid had been picked up by the police after they found him digging through the dumpster at McDonalds, and when they tried to bring him back to his house, his parents went crazy and started yelling at the cops that they didn't have a son, that their son was dead, and they weren't going to let that _thing_ set foot in their house ever again.

Child services had to be called, and it was this whole big thing as the courts fought to get the rest of the kids out of that house. Apparently the crazy parents had two younger kids, a boy and a girl, who were being brainwashed to think that their brother had died and been replaced by a Changeling.

Of course, we-and by we, I mean me and the rest of the Animorphs-assumed that the kid with the lion was a Controller who'd been found out. We waited for the other Yeerks to intervene, to throw the media off the scent of such an obvious breach of security.

But they didn't come. They didn't do anything. The few meetings we'd spied on, hoping to maybe take advantage of the situation to drive them into the light, revealed that they didn't give a rat's ass about the supposed 'Changeling'. He wasn't infested, wasn't one of theirs.

He was just a normal kid, who happened to have fucked up, abusive parents. For three days, we'd watched him, and for three days, he was surrounded by media hounds, and looked both angry and sad at the same time, all the time. He didn't even care about getting kicked out. He just wanted to make sure his brother and sister were safe. He'd never realized how messed up his parents were until his father literally threw him out the front door and locked him out of his own home.

That was why Sara and Jordan were afraid, afraid that I would leave them, afraid that I wouldn't be their sister anymore if Tinyel wasn't a boy.

"Mom already knows." I said as gently as I could. "She knows, and she's okay with it." Maybe that last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but they didn't need to know that. Even after I'd told mom that Tinyel wasn't a boy, she still called it one. Maybe that was because she knew I hadn't told anyone else yet, or maybe it was because she just…didn't care.

I didn't know, and I wouldn't have an answer until I talked to her about it again, this time when I was actually in my right state of mind, not overwhelmed with adrenaline and getting the air squeezed out of my lungs by two impossible choices, the bear coursing through my blood still roaring and raging for blood that wouldn't solve anything.

But I knew one thing. My mom would never kick me out, not ever. Maybe she wasn't as supportive as she could be, maybe she'd hidden things from me that she shouldn't have. But she would never kick me out.

I wasn't a touchy-feely sort of person, but this situation called for drastic measures. I pulled both my sisters into a big, one-armed hug, and felt Tinyel stretch out feathered wings from its back, to brush gently against both of their foreheads.

Comfort spread through the six of us like warm water, and even with only one good arm to use, and my ribs protesting the movement, and part of my brain shying away from the physical contact, I hugged them closer, and felt warm snake scales brush against my neck, and short, rough fur against my arm.

And I whispered, like a promise to the universe itself, "I'm not going anywhere."

* * *

So many things happened in such a short amount of time. So many things changed, and so many things stayed the same.

Jordan, Sara, and I had a front row seat in front of the TV when Jeremy Jason McCole made his live appearance on the Barry and Cindy Sue show, the first interview he'd done since his daemon, Agarva, had settled.

In _Power House_ , he played the character of Jason Smith, who's daemon, Fletcher, had just settled at the end of season five as a mockingbird. Which now meant that in season six, someone else's daemon would have to play Fletcher, since Agarva had settled, not as a mockingbird, but as a golden lion marmoset.

She was as orange as a leaf in fall, her fur long and flowing as she gracefully rested on Jeremy Jason's shoulder, while he spun around in a slow twirl so that the cameras could see her from every angle.

Settling was a big deal, especially for celebrities. And especially celebrities as _old_ as Jeremy Jason. He'd just turned sixteen in August, which had made him one of the oldest celebrities whose daemon hadn't settled yet. Most daemons settled somewhere between twelve and fourteen, and barely anyone got to age 16 without being settled yet.

He definitely wasn't the _oldest_ person ever to settle late, but he was one of the most already-famous ones.

I couldn't help but glance down at Tinyel again while I watched, wondering what it knew that I didn't.

Still, I couldn't be distracted for long, and when the animal keeper Bart Jacob's animals escaped all their cages all at once and ran amok on the set, ruining Jeremy Jason's interview and causing so much chaos that the show was taken off the air, I knew that the mission had been a success. And it was confirmed when Cassie called me later that day to let me know that some loud kid with a dog had taken over my favorite table in the mall's food court.

Jeremy Jason McCole was officially a resident of the Dig, and Erek had temporarily replaced him so that, at his next-and though no one knew it, last-public appearance, he could publicly badmouth the Sharing, ensuring that teenage girls the world over would turn their noses up at any offer to join.

After all, if their idol said it was bad, then they had no reason not to trust him.

After we'd gotten the Yeerk out of his head, Jeremy Jason would go to the Chee, and they would take him to wherever they brought the people we rescued from the Yeerks.

When I was finally given the green light by my mom to spend the night Cassie's house-with the stipulation that she drove me over, and Cassie's mom or dad drove me back-I was both excited and exhausted.

I'd told my mom that Jordan and Sara now knew that Tinyel wasn't a boy or a girl, and I'd asked her to start referring to it as such. She was doing okay, as long as she paid attention to her wording. The few times she did slip up after I reiterated how important it was to us, she looked so apologetic that I didn't have the heart to be annoyed. She was getting better, and maybe not surprisingly, it was Sara that reminded her about Tinyel's new status when she made a mistake.

I was done hiding, so I'd made sure they knew that Tinyel wanted to be called 'it' instead of 'he' even when we were out in public. Which meant that Cassie's parents would be finding out when I got to their house, and hopefully they, along with Cassie, who, admittedly, was the only one that started calling Tinyel by the correct words as soon as she found out, would start to accept me for who I was, for who Tinyel was.

The more people that knew, the more people who referred to my daemon as 'it' instead of 'he', the more a weight I hadn't even realized was there began to lift off my shoulders.

Cassie's parents took Tinyel's new pronouns in stride, and didn't make a huge deal out of it, or the fact that Tinyel was hanging out in the form of a small black dragon on my uninjured shoulder when Cassie let me in.

As far as they knew, I was there so that Cassie could help me play catch up with the homework I'd missed due to the whole house-falling-in-on-me thing, and they didn't make a fuss when Cassie suggested we take our books out to the field, since, as she put it, the fresh air would 'do me some good'.

Everyone knew that she was saying I wasn't comfortable going up to her room, but no one said it out loud, and I was thankful. I didn't need any more reminders that my brain was being stubborn, and was now apparently convinced that stairs equaled death.

So we went out to the field where they kept their horses, and where, secretly, Aximili sometimes liked to run when there was no one around. He said that, while they weren't sentient, horses had a much more logical design than us silly, unstable, uncoordinated humans. He just couldn't seem to get over the fact that we only had two legs without a tail for balance, no matter how many times he used his human morph.

The first time he'd seen me riding my bicycle, he'd practically had an aneurysm. For all his talk of the Andalite's superior science and technology, he sure had trouble updating his view of the universe. He genuinely could not understand how humans existed. Apparently, every single other sentient species the Andalites had ever met either had four or more legs, no legs at all, or, if they were bipedal, they at least had a tail for balance, like the T-Rex shaped Hork-Bajir.

Humans, by comparison, were illogical and ridiculous. Despite the fact that he could walk around in his human morph and watched us do so with ease day after day, he just couldn't wrap his head around the concept that we could keep our balance without a tail. And bicycles? The most ridiculous, insane, and _impossible_ thing he had ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

We made sure to walk our bikes once we got close enough to his scoop, just so that we could avoid another hour long lecture on why riding a bicycle should have been impossible. Someday I'd just have to get him on one. His morph was a combination of all of us, so surely the muscle memory for riding a bike was hidden in there somewhere, right?

Cassie and I trekked out to the field with our backpacks, and set up next to the fence where the horses were kept. There were a few big rocks sticking up out of the ground, and we'd always gone there during the summers to hang out, before we got ourselves involved in an intergalactic guerilla war between two highly-advanced species of aliens who didn't give a shit about any planets that got caught in their crossfire.

I climbed up onto what had once been 'my' rock, and Cassie sat on hers, and she proceeded to fill me in on everything I'd missed while I was absent from school. I'd be going back on Monday, right in time for a History test.

Too bad I couldn't use the excuse of my house falling in me to get out of it. But no, Cassie had already double checked with the teacher, and I would be expected to do the rest with the rest of the class.

The one freebie I would be getting though, was gym class. Which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because that meant I could use that period as an extra study hall, and get caught up on my homework. A curse, because of course I had to have the worst timing ever.

I'd be missing out on the annual dodgeball tournament.

And I _loved_ dodgeball.

While I was sulking over that, I suddenly noticed out of the corner of my eye that Cassie watching me more intently than normal. I pretended that I was still reading, though, and just let Tinyel surreptitiously watch her back from its perch on the top of my head. It had shed the dragon form in favor of a black swallowtail butterfly, with one wing male-type, and the other female-type, so that no one could get any ideas and start doubting our sincerity. It was easy to spy on people when you were a butterfly, compound eyes meant you could see in every direction at once, without it being obvious what you were looking at.

Alexander was a llama at the moment, pale greyish white, with darker patches of brown over his eyes, sort of like a raccoon's mask. He was grazing a few feet away, trying to look casual.

But I could tell that he was watching me, too.

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what they were waiting for me to do or say, before I just gave up, unable to think of anything that would explain their behavior.

I put my history textbook down with a huff, and lifted my head to catch Cassie's eye before she could hurry up and look away.

She had the decency to look abashed, and though it was hard to tell with her skin being so dark, I thought she might have even been blushing. The way Alexander sort of jumped and pranced a few more steps away from me, turning his face away as he did so, sure seemed to confirm it.

"What?" It was hard to stop an edge from crawling into my voice. I didn't like being stared at, and if the reason for the staring was embarrassing enough to make Cassie blush, I probably wouldn't like it, at all.

Cassie fidgeted nervously, dropping my gaze so that her eyes could sweep the sky, the rocks we were sitting on, the grass, looking anywhere but at me.

"Cassie, what is it?"

Finally she looked back at me, hesitation clear in every line of her face. She said something, but it was too low for me to hear, as though her voice had gotten scared away. I asked her to repeat herself.

But she just shook her head. "No," She said, as Alexander trotted over, and flowed like water into the form of a small bee to land on the back of her hand, "No, it's nothing. I just-was thinking about stuff. But it's not important right now."

And to emphasize this fact, she picked up the pile of flashcards she'd made earlier, and began quizzing me on the finer details of the War of 1812.

I tried to get her to tell me what exactly it was that she'd been thinking about, but she just shrugged it off, and deflected back to studying every time I tried to bring it back up. Eventually, I gave up again, and resigned myself to cramming for the history test that I was probably just going to fail anyways.

* * *

When it started to get dark, we packed up our books and notes in our backpacks, and made our way back to Cassie's house. After dinner, we set up blankets and pillows on the couches in the living room, where we would be sleeping.

I was just glad that their house had two bathrooms, one on the first floor, and another on the second, because otherwise it would have sucked. I'd snuck away for a minute or two during dinner to see if I could get myself to go upstairs, but when I reached the first step, it felt like my whole body just froze, and refused to go any further. By the time I gave up, I was shaking from head to toe, and my heart was pounding so hard I could have sworn everyone could hear it when I walked back into the dining room.

Thankfully, they had the air conditioner on, so I was able to disguise my shivering as being from the cold, instead of fear. I don't really think I fooled Cassie at all, but her parents seemed to believe it, or at least, they didn't try to dispute my statement or make a big deal about it.

Tomorrow, Cassie and I would go to visit Aximili and the crocodile at the Dig. It would be the first time I'd seen Aximili since that fateful meeting, and the first time I'd met with the crocodile after expelling it from my DNA. Tomorrow would be interesting, to say the least.

I fell asleep quickly, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, with Tinyel curled up on my chest as some shape rendered indefinable by the darkness.

Though, right before I closed my eyes, I swore I saw a few patches of white dance across its pelt like stars.

* * *

I don't know what I was expecting the crocodile's daemon to end up as. But I wasn't expecting it to be an almost perfect copy of me.

It was like looking into a mirror, except the crocodile's daemon didn't have the misfortune of having a broken arm. So she was sans cast, and, unfortunately, sans clothing as well.

Cassie had covered her face with her hands in horror and embarrassment, and Alexander had turned himself into an ostrich _just_ so that he could bury his head in the dirt. Despite the fact that Cassie had assured me when we were in kindergarten that ostriches didn't _really_ bury their heads in the sand.

One moment we'd been walking through the woods to get to Aximili's scoop, and then we turned a corner around a tree, and came face to face with the very human, very, very _naked_ daemon standing in the entrance to Aximili's clearing.

I was too shocked to really do anything but stare at her, and of all the things that could have popped into my head at that moment, my brain chose to take notice of the fact that she'd gotten my eye color wrong.

While my eyes were blue-a trait I'd inherited from my mom-the daemon in front of me had brown eyes. Or maybe I should say green. They were sort of a mix, and seemed almost _too_ bright.

She was staring at me, and I was staring at her, and then Aximili just casually came running up from the side, obviously having just finished his morning run as he slowed to a careful trot. He was panting through his nose, his sides heaving, his hooves noticeably shiny and his lower legs sort of stained green, which meant he'd cut the grass with his tail blade before eating it, to better absorb the nutrients. A tiring effort, but, he assured, worth it.

He smiled when he saw Cassie and I, and then turned curious and confused when he realized that Cassie had her eyes covered, and the fact that Alexander had buried his head in the dirt, and that we were all blocking the way into his scoop.

But he didn't seem surprised to see the daemon standing in front of us, stark naked as the day she, or well, I should say _I_ was born. In fact, he didn't really react to her at all, aside from turning his stalk eyes from her to me and back again in confusion.

‹…Is there something the matter, Rachel?› He asked, sounding just as confused as he looked.

"Um…" I wasn't sure how to respond. "She's...naked."

Aximili made an expression that, on a human face, would have required raising an eyebrow. ‹Yes? She is a daemon, is she not? Tinyel is similarly 'naked', as is Alexander, and it has never been an issue. I was under the impression that daemons were not required by your culture to wear artificial skin. Was I mistaken?› Half Andalite superiority, half curiosity, and nowhere near as self-conscious as he had been before.

My eyes darted to his hands, where the black lines of fire still danced, now even more intricate as they wove through his blue fur. They almost seemed like vines, climbing up his arms, twining and twisting together and almost seeming to form flowers as I watched. If every single curve and flare hadn't instinctively screamed the word _**FIRE**_ in my head, I could have mistaken it for a plant. I wondered how much its discovery was helping him cope with life on our alien planet.

I tried not to stare too much, and focused on keeping my gaze locked with Aximili's. And then I realized how completely rude that was, ignoring the crocodile's daemon as though she weren't standing _right there_ , and I dragged my gaze back to meet hers again.

She smiled, and it was a sort of nervous smile, like she wasn't really sure if she should be there or not.

"I'm not um-mad or anything." I assured, feeling my face heating up from embarrassment. I wasn't mad, I _wasn't_. But she was wearing _my body_ and she was _completely naked_. In front of Aximili! And Cassie! And-

And…

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh no, oh no oh nonononono _noooooooo!_

My voice was strangled when I spoke, the words clawing themselves out of my throat and into the air as every single molecule of my being was suffused with horror. "Ax." I dragged my gaze towards him the way a dying man drags himself towards water. "Please-Please tell me Jeremy Jason McCole hasn't seen her running around like this."

Cassie let out a gasp of horror, and Alexander pulled his head out of the dirt so that he could melt into a dog and whimper, " _Oh no._ "

But it wasn't Aximili who answered me, it was another thought-speak voice, one that I almost didn't recognize, now that it was separated from my own thoughts.

‹No, Fletchetcher has not gone near Jeremy Jason McCole. Only Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill has spoken to or been seen by him, as I cannot enter the Dig, and Fletchetcher does not enjoy travelling far from my side.›

To my shock, I realized that the crocodile had been only a few feet away from us the entire time, behind its daemon and in the clearing, resting against a fallen log. Its dark green scales had blended in almost perfectly with the moss covering the log, and the only reason I could see it now was because it was moving, lifting itself onto its feet and starting towards us.

Immediately, its daemon-Fletchetcher?-smiled widely, and skipped over towards it. Without a moment of hesitation, it plopped down on the crocodile's back, and, in between one moment and the next, melted into a carpet of moss. It spread along the crocodile's back like a river, swarming down its legs and carefully wrapping its head, delicately tracing circles around the eyes and nose. And then the entire thing turned bright, searing red, like a leaf in fall. All of this within a few seconds, all of this without any surprise from Aximili or the crocodile itself.

All I could do was stare, and blink.

My brain was still struggling with the relief from the fact that Jeremy Jason McCole _hadn't_ seen my daemon doppelganger running around naked to say anything. I just focused on breathing, and calming my break-neck speed racing heart. I fanned myself with one hand to cool my face, which was still burning with a blush.

And I realized suddenly that it wasn't just the embarrassment that was making my heart race and my eyes burn and the air catch in my lungs.

Aximili had just seen me naked. Cassie had just seen me naked. Alexander had just seen me naked.

I couldn't get my heart rate back under control. I couldn't slow my breathing. Tears blurred my eyes, and I couldn't hold them back. My hands were shaking, and I stared down at them, at the spot on my good wrist where the firefighter's glove had wrapped itself, to pull me bloody and bruised and naked and too weak to do anything but cry from the wreckage of my house, the house that I had destroyed. The house that had collapsed beneath my elephant weight and could have killed my sisters or my mom if they'd been in the kitchen or the hallway when it happened.

I moved without even being aware of it, without even directing my feet to stumble backwards.

My eyes burned, and I felt like I was choking, on dust, on sobs, on shame, on fear. Tears welled up and ran down my face, reducing the world to a blur of confused colors and shapes. Adrenaline crashed through my system, making me want to punch and kick and scream and run away all at once. But I couldn't, because my ribs were broken, and my arm was broken, and the only reason I was on my feet at all was because I had prescription pain medicine to keep at bay all of the damage the morphing technology had done to my body because of my allergy.

Tinyel changed from its butterfly form to a pure white, ragged wolf, the same wolf it had been that day, so long ago, playing out in the snow- and growled warningly when the blur that I knew was Cassie tried to reach out for me. It leaned itself against my shaking legs, supporting me when I was sure I would fall over at any moment.

Voices came at me from a distance, like they had to swim through molasses before they could reach my ears. Aximili's thought speak, confused and alarmed. Cassie saying something, and the Crocodile's thought-speak, aimed at me, trying to calm me down. But it was too familiar. It had been there too, right before I fell. Right before I was made more helpless than I have ever felt since that night in the construction yard when I watched an Andalite Prince get eaten alive.

My back hit a tree, and I flinched away, almost tripping over Tinyel, standing so close to my legs that it might as well have just melted into them. I wanted to run away, from their gazes, suddenly so heavy, their voices, so loud, the sunlight slanting in through the trees, so like the glares and flashes of cameras as they pulled me out of the rubble.

I tried to turn, tried to run, and that time I really did trip over Tinyel. We both sprawled to the ground, and the pain that flashed through my broken arm when my cast connected with a rock sent the world spiraling into white.

That gave Cassie enough time to dark forward, and grab my arm. My good arm. Right over where the firefighter had grabbed me.

I tried to yank my arm out of her grip, pure animal terror flooding through me, and Tinyel snarled, and before I even realized what was happening-

Tinyel lunged, more like a snake than a wolf. _White Fang_ part of my brain whispered, _White Fang._ In a flash, white fangs tore into dark skin, and in another flash, my daemon had leapt clear, shoving both of us away from the once reaching, now bleeding, now recoiling, hand.

Too quickly for anyone to react, too quickly for more than the faintest shrieking of _**WRONG**_ to weigh in my mouth like blood, my teeth suddenly both burning hot and numb at the same time. Too quickly for me to taste the copper on my tongue before Tinyel spit it out, suddenly realizing what It had done.

Too quickly to stop it, too quickly to take it back.

But it was enough.

It was enough to bring me back to my senses, it was enough to lift the weight of my house off of my chest. It was enough to make me remember where I was, when I was.

And then, from my vantage point on the cold, hard dirt, I was in perfect view to see the ruin that had become Cassie's hand.

Blood poured from her mangled fingers, even as she stumbled backwards, her face so shocked, so surprised. As though she didn't really even feel the pain yet. She just stared at what had once been her hand, shocked into stillness, into silence. Blood splattered onto the dirt, onto leaves, filling the air with the woefully familiar scent of copper.

Logic screamed through me at the top of its lungs. " _MORPH!_ " I shouted, still on the ground, still lying where I had fallen, too afraid to move. Tinyel was as still as a statue, staring at Cassie with amber eyes as wide as saucers. Red flecked the fur around its mouth like paint. Some of it dripped slowly from its chin, and onto my knee. It was warm against my chilled skin.

Drip, drip, drip…

The forest had gone silent, all except for that sound, that quiet dripping of blood.

"Cassie, _morph_." I begged, grabbing onto the scruff around Tinyel's neck. I wasn't sure if I was holding it back, or trying to pull myself up.

For just a few seconds longer, she continued to stare. I think she was in shock. Alexander was as still as Tinyel, still a dog, one paw lifted off the ground, as though he'd been frozen mid-step. But I could see his sides moving as he breathed, I could see the terror in his eyes as he stared at what remained of Cassie's hand.

And then, slowly, she began to morph.

Bloodied, mangled, _ruined_ fingers melded together, grew hard, and shiny black. Grey fur sprouted from her skin like a waterfall, whooshing up her arms and over her shoulders.

I closed my eyes, and buried my face in Tinyel's fur. She was becoming a wolf.

And I knew why.

Because if she didn't become a wolf right at this very second, then she wouldn't ever be able to do it ever again. She wouldn't ever be able to look at a wolf again. And that meant that she wouldn't be able to help them, wouldn't be able to shove life-saving pills down their throats, wouldn't be able to calm them down when they were scared and snarling at her when all she was trying to do was help.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

I kept my eyes closed as she morphed, and I kept them closed when the sounds of morphing stopped. Tinyel didn't move, and it didn't change. With every fiber of my being, I begged silently for this not to be its settled form. I didn't think I would be able to handle that. I knew it heard me, knew it knew what I was thinking, but it didn't change into anything else, just stayed still as a statue, trembling beneath my hands with the weight of what it had done.

It was not the worst rule we could have broken. No, no, that would have required _me_ going after someone else's daemon. It wasn't the worst rule we could have broken. But it was up there, it was so high up there that the only way down was to fall. We'd forced something onto Cassie that should never be forced on anyone. She'd gotten a glimpse of who we were, in the worst way possible, without any warning or even the shadow of consent. She'd gotten a glimpse of who we were, through the flash of teeth through bone.

And if it had been anyone else, if Cassie hadn't been one of us, one of the Animorphs, her hand would have been permanently ruined. Tinyel's teeth had flashed like quicksilver through muscle and bone. A single snap of those powerful jaws, and gone was Cassie's hand. I'd read _White Fang_ from cover to cover more times than I could count. It had been read so many times that it was starting to fall apart. Tinyel had loved the idea. Lunge forward, snap, leap back. As fast as a cobra. A snake in wolf's clothes. The enemy's throat ripped out and spilling their lifeblood onto the dirt, and us, untouched, safe. Still alive to fight another day.

But this wasn't play-pretend.

This wasn't some underground dog fighting ring. This wasn't us playing pretend out in the snow. This was real, this was _Cassie_ that we had attacked, that we had hurt, that we had _violated_.

I kept my eyes closed. I couldn't bear to look at her, or Alexander, or gods, Aximili. What would he think of the display he'd just witnessed? He didn't know much about daemons, but he was learning. He knew enough to know that was had just happened wasn't something that was ever supposed to happen.

I clenched my hands in Tinyel's fur until my fingers ached and my bad wrist screamed its protest along with the rest of the slow agony in my arm. Tinyel didn't protest, didn't shy away. It just stood there, blood still dripping off its chin, staring at Cassie, at what we had done, looking our guilt in the face for the both of us.

I heard leaves crunch gently beneath furry paws. I felt a wet nose gently nudge my arm. I smelled the hot breath that rolled out of a mouth filled with razor teeth that would never hurt me, not the way I had just hurt her.

‹Rachel, I'm okay.› Her voice was soft, and only slightly shaky. She'd tried to collect herself before she spoke to me, before she moved closer to the monster that had just attacked her both physically and mentally. ‹I'm _okay_.› She repeated, louder, steadier.

No she wasn't. You couldn't just be _okay_ after someone's daemon bit off your hand. You couldn't just be _okay_ after your best friend hurt you in the worst way possible.

Maybe it was true, what they'd started saying about me. Maybe this war really was driving me crazy, turning me into an out of control psycho. Some kind of nut that belonged in the crazy house.

Tinyel finally moved. The tremors turned to shaking. It shook its head, shook me off. I fell backwards before Cassie caught me on her shoulder, her warm fur tickling my skin. I opened my eyes, and met hers.

Brown and amber, jagged and smooth, swirled together into a single color.

‹Rachel,› She said firmly, ‹Listen to me.›

Just like I'd told Aximili.

I could feel my throat getting tight again. Felt tears gather behind my eyes again. But there was none of the panic, none of the adrenaline. Now it was just guilt, and sadness, and fear.

But I listened. I listened to Cassie's words, to her gentle voice. I allowed her to calm me back down, like the snapping, snarling, frightened animal that I was.

* * *

It took almost an hour before I could get back on my feet, almost an hour before the shaking in my limbs subsided, and my tears dried up and the fear ran away, leaving nothing but exhaustion in its wake.

It took almost an hour before I could look at Cassie, still a wolf, without wanting to cry for what I'd done. She wasn't mad at me, or at Tinyel. She didn't blame us. She kept saying that, over and over, as though repetition alone would make me believe it, would make it all go away.

Nothing could erase what I'd done. And Tinyel refused to change forms, even with the red still staining the white around its mouth. It wasn't settled, no, it made that clear. But it wasn't going to change, even though every line in its body screamed guilt and sorrow. I don't know what it was trying to say by staying in that form, and I don't even think _it_ knew. But Cassie didn't say anything, didn't flinch away, didn't _not_ look at my daemon.

Alexander was much more skittish, sticking to forms of birds and bugs, and staying glued to Cassie's side, perching on her shoulder or head, almost invisible in her thick fur, and never taking his eyes off Tinyel.

Aximili approached cautiously out of the woods when Cassie was finally demorphing back to human, though, in truth, I hadn't noticed him leave.

The fire on his hands had grown brighter in his absence. Now they flickered with light, and seemed to shine almost gold beneath the black. I didn't know what it meant, if it was good, or bad, or somewhere in between.

I was almost too tired to care.

The panic attack, and then the freak out, and then the guilt, and the crying. It had wiped me out, like my brain could only handle so many emotions at once before it had to shut down and restart, or risk overheating, like an outdated computer whose fans had stopped working. I got to my feet, but my legs were shaky and weak, and I had to lean on Tinyel, its fur still white marred with red, and as cold as snow beneath my trembling fingers. Tinyel would lend me its strength, as long as I didn't fall into the gaping maw that was trying to tell me I was a monster and a freak.

Aximili told me, very quietly, that he had seen even some of the oldest and strongest Andalite warriors suffer damage from war. I was neither old, nor experienced. I was a child, even among my own species. This reaction was not my fault, any more than the allergy had been. Frightened animals are dangerous animals. And frightened warriors even more so.

But they couldn't just wash away what I'd done. I couldn't just pretend that what had happened was okay. It wasn't okay. It wasn't.

"I'm sorry, Cassie." I whispered again, for what might have been the hundredth time. She put her hand on my shoulder, her movements slow so that I could pull away if I wanted to. I let her. There was cloth separating our skin, so I let her. I itched beneath the weight, but I let her. I owed her this small comfort, at least. She needed to know that she could touch me without being attacked. Without her hand literally getting ripped off.

"You were having a panic attack." She said, just as softly, as she started leading me away, back through the woods, back towards the field, back towards her house. Alexander was perched atop her head, balanced as a moth on her hair. "I should have listened the first time when Tinyel growled at me."

My daemon looked at the ground and whined softly, but it still didn't change its shape, and still allowed the blood to stain its lips. Its fur was so white that when we walked through a patch of sunlight, it was almost blinding, almost exactly like the glare of snow.

What was it trying to say without words, by staying in this form that had attacked our best friend? An act that, if it had been anyone other than Cassie, would have resulted in the permanent loss of someone's hand?

I still don't know.

We walked through the woods, quiet, the only sounds the crunch of leaves underfoot, and the soft, dainty clip clop of Aximili's hooves against scattered stones.

I glanced at Cassie, noticing for the first time that she was barefoot, and dressed in nothing but her morphing outfit, the skin-tight, black leotard I'd bought her several years ago, in an attempt to get her to do gymnastics with me. She hated revealing clothes, so hers had short sleeves instead of straps, and went all the way down to her ankles, making her look like a professional ballerina, or maybe an ice-skater.

In her arms, she carried the balled-up remains of her overalls and t-shirt.

They'd been ruined when she morphed to wolf. Her shoes, at least, had survived, since she was wearing them, but not her socks. Her wolf claws had poked holes straight through them. They were lying atop the destroyed overalls. I knew those were her favorite overalls, because I recognized the purple stain on one of the straps, from where she'd spilled jelly on it a few years ago. She'd had them for forever, and no matter how many times I bugged her to buy new ones, she insisted that there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. Age just made them more comfortable.

And now they were ruined because of me.

She caught me looking, guessed what I was thinking, and had the audacity to roll her eyes. "Rachel," She said, starting to sound exasperated with me, "It's fine. I like my overalls baggy. You had your eyes closed, so obviously you missed it, but I just slipped right out of them." She patted my shoulder, then finally pulled her hand away entirely. She shrugged. "It's actually so nice out here that I almost forgot to put them back on. Just give me a second."

She took a step back, and unceremoniously dropped her clothes to the forest floor, where they kicked up a small cloud of dust and got covered in another layer of dirt, so that she could kick her boots off. Her shirt was ruined beyond repair, ripped straight down the middle, wolf shoulders and chest far wider than even the already-baggy old shirt could handle. She put it on anyways, since the overalls would hide most of the damage.

When she was dressed again, she shoved the ruined socks into her deep pockets, and we started walking again, and at least for me, the silence was uneasy.

But it's hard to stay tense around Cassie for very long. She works with injured, frightened animals all day, and she's picked up with aura of complete calm. See, if she started freaking out every time an animal was upset, it would further upset the animal, and it would just be an endless, vicious cycle of anxiety.

I was entirely aware that, in this metaphor, I was the animal, but I didn't really care. Cassie was relaxed. Cassie was casual. It was hard to keep my muscles tensed and ready to run when faced with such calm. Even Alexander was getting back to normal, venturing away from her to turn into a small, silver fox. He trotted along infront of us, sniffing the plants and trees we passed with interest. He flicked his tail every few seconds, and glanced up over his shoulder towards where Tinyel was hiding behind me.

Slowly, hesitantly, my daemon moved out from its position flat against my side, and, slowly, hesitantly, choreographing every movement so as not to cause alarm, it moved to Alexander's side. There, it finally dropped the wolf form, settling instead into a matching silver fox to follow at the other daemon's heels.

And from there, it didn't take long before the two were nipping at each other's heels, chasing each other in playful circles, and everything was back to as normal as it could possibly get for us.

* * *

Long before I was ever brave enough to set foot near the Dig again, Jeremy Jason McCole was freed from his Controller, and both he and it were remanded into the care of the Chee. I was told that the Yeerk had surrendered halfway through the second day, so now it would spend the rest of this war swimming around the Chee's very own, miniature Yeerk pool. As for what would happen to Jeremy Jason, I didn't know, and I preferred it that way.

I didn't go back to the Dig because I was afraid to face the crocodile. I knew it hadn't done it on purpose, and I knew, intellectually, that there was no reason to be afraid of its daemon. But I wasn't sure I could handle it if it chose to take my form like that again. Cassie morphing me had been bad enough. But I'd given her permission. The crocodile's daemon-Fletchetcher, Cassie told me it's name was, chosen by Aximili, after Jeremy Jason's character from _Power House_ -hadn't asked for permission. It probably didn't even realize it was doing anything wrong.

In a way, it had been born from my body. It probably thought that using my body as a shape was just as natural as turning itself into moss, or a rock, or any other form it spent time in. It didn't know any better.

It wasn't even just embarassment, though there was plenty of that. It was just too close to what had happened when my house fell in, it was too much, too soon.

The only thing I could be grateful for was that it was only Aximili, Cassie, and I that had seen her running around like that. And Aximili was an alien who ran around naked all the time, so he didn't think it was a big deal at all. In fact, he thought I was the weird one for being upset about it.

But he'd promised never to mention it to Jake or Marco or Tobias, so that, at least, was a blessing.

While I was too cowardly to step foot near the Dig, Cassie kept me informed of the developments going on over there. For one thing, the crocodile had decided on a name for itself-or, I should say, for _herself_.

Even though the crocodile I'd morphed was male, which meant that this crocodile's body was also male, she identified as a girl. Probably because she'd spent a lot of time in my brain, but that was beside the point.

I was half afraid she'd named herself after me, the way her daemon took on forms based on me, but to my relief, and confusion, she'd decided on the name Lillian.

Or at least, it confused me, until I remembered that Aximili had set up a TV in his scoop, and had access to Nickelodeon. And specifically, the _Rugrats_.

Thinking about the namesake was almost funny enough for me to forget the whole situation with her daemon. Almost.

But not quite.

At some point I would have to go back to the Dig, and actually talk with her, and actually get to know her as someone other than the crocodile who had shared my head for a few days. But I still wasn't allowed to go on any missions, and, honestly, I was glad for the excuse to stay away.

Not everything needed to be faced immediately. Not every fear had to be cut down as soon as it rose up. I needed time to heal, and I couldn't spend it stressing myself out forcing myself into positions I didn't want to be in.

I would let my broken arm and wrist and ribs heal. I would give the new fear in my mind some time to ease. I would keep figuring myself out, and I would try to make the process as painless as possible, for everyone around me.

I never wanted a repeat of the wolf incident, and if I wanted to prevent that, I had to stop pushing myself to my limits. I needed to take a break. I needed to take a step back, and just let the rest of the world in. For so long, I'd worried about so much, but now those worries had been lifted from my shoulders, however temporarily, however much I didn't like it.

I couldn't help anyone if I blew my cover. I couldn't help anyone if I didn't give myself time to heal properly. Broken bones didn't mend overnight, not for normal people.

And that was what I still had to pretend to be, even I was autistic, and Tinyel was an it instead of a he or a she. Normal was still something I had to strive for, when there were others around me that could be watching. Normal was the only thing keeping us safe, keeping us secret.

So I lazed around the house when I wasn't at school, and I tried to catch up on my homework, and I watched movies, and went shopping with Cassie, and Tinyel kept trying out new forms, always black or white, and always more otherworldly beautiful than the last. It hung out in its white wolf form more often than anything else, and I started to understand why. It was reminding itself, and me, that it wasn't bad. The form itself was not anything to be afraid of. It was no different than any other, and it was tied to both good, and bad, memories.

It couldn't give up that day, so long ago, when we played in the snow without a care in the world. It couldn't give up the innocence of that moment, the purity of it. That was before we ever realized that we were different. That was before we ever realized that people thought there was something wrong with us. It couldn't give up those memories. It _wouldn't_.

And neither would I.

The good and the bad, you had to take it all in. You couldn't just cut out the parts you didn't like, you couldn't pretend they weren't there. You couldn't just say, _this form is bad,_ and _this one is good_. It was so much more complicated than that. Maybe Tinyel felt more comfortable in forms that were black and white, but nothing could be that clear cut, nothing could be that simple.

We wouldn't stop being a wolf just because of one bad moment, when we were frightened and scared and confused. Giving that up would be giving up a piece of ourselves that we could never get back. That would be hiding away our fear like it didn't exist. That would be lying to ourselves, more than anything else.

And that was something I refused to do ever again.


End file.
